By Madison Powers, CQ Guest Columnist

Memory, as we know, has a way of playing tricks on us.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War, and many of the details surrounding the debates unfolding over the months preceding the war are lost in a haze of clouded memory.

As psychologists tell us, the tendency to impose a spurious congruence between what we think now and what we thought then is often an adaptive strategy. Internal pressures to achieve what is known as “cognitive consistency” serve to assuage the burdens of guilt about bad choices and allay our nagging doubts about our capacities for sound judgment.

Some of those who voted to authorize the war in October 2002 , but now characterize that decision as a mistake, defend their votes by suggesting that current criticism of the decision to go to war is warranted only in 20/20 hindsight. Were that true, it would be a comforting way of making coherent sense of past choices with considerably less personal psychic toll.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton , for example, in her answer to the question of whether her vote to authorize the war was wrong, replied, “if I had the opportunity to act now, based on what I know now, I never would have voted that way.”

To some observers, however, such a claim is preposterous on its face. How is it possible, they ask, that the public can allow politicians to get away with that? After all, there were vigorous debates at the time in both the House and Senate, and 23 of the 100 Senators opposed the resolution for reasons that are virtually identical to the ones now cited.

The explanation is actually surprisingly clear. It is an argument that allows us to think that the enthusiasm for the war, shared by the much of the public and the press at the time, is blameless.

Because all of us have a stake in preserving cognitive consistency, it’s reassuring for the rest of us to be enveloped in the blanket of blamelessness that our political leaders now provide.

By contrast, those politicians who remind us that they knew better even then are in a difficult position. It’s hard to cast blame on the judgment of political leaders who voted for war without also impugning the judgment of those who lined up behind them.

The excuse for voting to authorize the war, based on “what we know now that we didn’t know then,” is thus quite handy for those in need of a story line for their apology.

But just what is it that was not known, but that if known, might have made the crucial difference?

No doubt, most listeners assume that the fact that none of us knew for sure whether there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is what is intended. However, that explanation on its own, is seriously flawed, and it’s not quite what some are saying.

In order to set the record straight, we have to look back beginning with events of August, 2002, when no one other than Tim Russert seemed to be at work in Washington.

The drumbeat of war was unmistakable. The view that Hussein likely possessed such weapons, or might soon do so, was the unquestioned official Washington view until an op-ed piece by Brent Scowcroft in The Wall Street Journal on August 15, did much to transform the terms of the debate.

Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush, drew stark conclusions. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. There is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of his aggression.”

By Labor Day, the mountain of evidence casting doubt on the WMD question was growing at a rapid pace. So too was the public discussion of that evidence.

Increasingly, then, the case for war became more focused on regime change rather than the truth of any claim about the existence of WMD, as skeptical voices multiplied.

When confronted on Meet The Press by Tim Russert on September 8th, Vice President Cheney conceded that the case for war did not depend entirely on certainty of knowledge about WMD. When asked whether it was regime change or disarmament that was the goal, Cheney was unequivocal that it was regime change.

By the time the votes for authorization were taken in the House on October 10th and in the Senate on October 11th, the considerable doubts about WMD had already entered the calculus of many who ultimately voted for war.

Senator Clinton’s floor speech is a great example. She raised several points that cast doubt regarding both the evidence for WMD and the degree of imminent threat posed to the US. She staked her vote on the claim that “I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.”

So it seems that what Senator Clinton and others must now regret – what they know now that they claimed not to know then – must be their judgment of President Bush’s intentions, not merely what they now know about the absence of WMD.

Indeed, careful attention to what Senator Clinton said then, and what she says now, reveals a remarkable consistency. What she says she did not know has little to do with the existence of WMD and everything to do with her judgment of what Bush was likely to do.

In fact, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio , D-Ore., in his floor speech on October 10th, argued against those who sought to characterize their own votes, not as a vote for war, but for giving the President a stick by which he could merely threaten the Iraqi leader without necessarily going to war.

DeFazio argued that “we know from experience” that the President “would interpret this language in the broadest way possible” and that it would not be plausible later on to hide behind the fig leaf of potentially faulty intelligence estimates. He urged fellow House members to recognize this vote for what it was – a vote for regime change, no matter what the facts about WMD or the prospects for disarmament turned out to be.

If there is anything that those who would like their vote back need most to explain, it’s what reason they had for thinking it was a vote for anything other than the war President Bush so clearly seemed determined to wage.