Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who has died at age 87, was a prominent mainstream Democrat with presidential ambitions in fall of 2002. But unlike most of his contemporaries in the upper echelons of the Senate Democratic Caucus at that critical stage in the first term of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Graham refused to accept the Republican administration’s bogus arguments for invading and occupying Iraq.

For all their later protestations about having been misled and ill-advised, the fact remains that Democrats who should have known better did Cheney’s bidding at the point when a disastrous war might have been averted.

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who went on to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, voted to authorize the Bush-Cheney administration to use military force against Iraq—after Cheney announced, without evidence, in August of 2002, that “there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

So did North Carolina Senator John Edwards, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004 who twice sought the party’s presidential nod.

So did New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who went on serve as secretary of state and later became the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

So did Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, became Barack Obama’s vice president, and in 2020 was elected as the 46th president of the United States.

They all got it wrong.

Graham, a former governor of Florida and three-term senator at the time that Cheney and his cabal were promoting their Big Lie, would later explain his opposition by saying, “I am not a pacifist. In this instance, it was the wrong target.”

How did he know? Graham was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He called for, organized, and cochaired the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, the comprehensive investigation by the Senate committee that he led and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence into 9/11. There was, literally, no one in the Senate, no Democrat, no Republican, who knew more about the intelligence—or, to be more precise, the lack of intelligence—that Cheney and Bush used to make a case for what turned out to be an unnecessary and illegal war.

That led Graham to cast what was, arguably, the most compelling of the 23 Senate votes against the authorization of the use of military force that the Bush-Cheney administration demanded in the fall of 2002. There were other prominent Democratic foes—Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy and West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, in particular. But of the brave band of senators who refused to hand a blank check to the administration, Graham’s vote stood out because of his role as head of the intelligence committee.