Bush "has said Saddam is an evil man," then-Gov. Dean said during a news conference in Montpelier, Vt., on Sept. 19, 2002. "Well, there are a lot of evil people. Before our sons and daughters come home in pine boxes, I think it's incumbent upon us to have a better reason than 'he's an evil man.' "
His strong denunciation of the president's push toward war with Iraq, which the administration ultimately launched in March, fueled much of Dean's rise earlier this year and separated him from the crowded pack of Democratic candidates vying for the presidency.
"Howard Dean took a bold and courageous step that wasn't popular for anybody in politics to do so," Hank Johnson, a county commissioner in Atlanta, said on Saturday as he and other local leaders announced their support for Dean. "When he came out against that unjust war, I was sold right there on the spot."
Despite his antiwar image, Dean never was against an American invasion of Iraq in all circumstances.
"I'm not against attacking Saddam Hussein, but we can't do it without a good reason, and so far the president has not made the case," he told reporters in Montpelier on Sept. 19, 2002.
During a trip to Iowa a few weeks later, Dean said that he wanted Bush to put more effort into diplomacy with other nations.
"It's conceivable we would have to act unilaterally, but that should not be our first option," Dean told reporters before the state Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines.
It was there that Dean said he supported a proposal co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.). An alternative resolution, it narrowed the rationale for war to the need to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction instead of justifying an attack on the basis of Hussein's human rights violations or other arguments for regime change.
The measure would have required the Bush administration to make another effort to get the U.N. Security Council to support using force to destroy Iraq's weapons program, although it still reserved the right for the United States to act unilaterally. The proposal also asked the president to provide congressional leaders with a written determination that the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was so grave that the United States had to attack.
But as the White House secured support for a broader war resolution, support for the Biden-Lugar alternative stalled, and the measure was never formally introduced.
