U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, explained Saturday why he remains opposed to the Iraq war but voted to authorize it.

He justified voting in favor of the Iraq war, but against supplying $87 billion toward military and reconstruction aid — a position that has put many fellow Democrats, such as Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., under criticism.

“I made a mistake, and I wouldn’t do it again,” he said.

Harkin came to Iowa State Saturday to discuss the war in Iraq. He was joined by Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, in the Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall of the Music Building.

He said the reason he and many other staunch opponents of force in Iraq voted in favor of occupation was President Bush’s “emphatic assertions that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.”

“Bush was deceiving us — he had no intention of allowing U.N. inspectors to stop us,” he said.

Harkin said Bush used many tactics to fool opponents of the war. For example, Bush didn’t support U.N. weapons inspectors because he didn’t want them to come back empty-handed, he said.

“Bush wanted to use the fear of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for attacking Iraq,” Harkin said.

“The result was that he misled Congress and got his war,” he said, “a pre-emptive war that has ended in disaster.”

These factors prompted Harkin to vote against supplying aid to Iraq. He asserted he was not voting against reconstruction, but he was against giving the Bush administration another blank check. He said the money would support energy companies such as Halliburton, whose former CEO was Vice President Dick Cheney, with no-bid contracts.

“I’m not going to trust a word of this president again because he’ll say anything to get his way,” he said. “President Bush is a compulsive mis-leader.”

Harkin said there were three prescriptions for reconstruction in Iraq: giving the U.N. control, providing more accountability for how the $87 billion is spent and getting Bush out of the White House in 2004.

Most attendees applauded Harkin’s statements against Bush’s handling of the American occupation in Iraq. However, other audience members spoke out against his stance on other political issues, such as his strong support of Israel.

Jeffrey Weiss, of Des Moines, asked Harkin why he supported weapons inspections of Iran and Syria, which have no nuclear weapons, and not Israel, which does.

Harkin replied that to the best of his knowledge, Israel had never threatened its neighbors.

In contrast, Israel’s neighbors have a policy to eradicate their nation.

However, Weiss said he was not persuaded by the answer.

“I was surprised Harkin said Israel’s neighbors all want to eradicate their state,” he said.

“If he was a political science student, he would be flunked,” Weiss said.

As Harkin juggled the political aspect of the Iraq war, Telhami analyzed the historical and cultural factors.

He said the current situation was scary because terrorism will proliferate, not decrease.

He said we should expect more terrorism after the war, not less. He explained there are two sides of terrorism: the supply side and the demand side.

“Supply side terrorists are those which cannot be reasoned with and must be confronted by military force,” he said.

“America knows how to deal with these types of terrorists quite well.”

Demand-side terrorists, which develop due to poor living conditions and being misunderstood, can’t be eliminated by force, he said.

“If we simply use force and wipe out the demand-side terrorists, other people will enlist in their cause if we don’t eliminate the reasons these people join,” he said.

Telhami said an unrecognized difficulty of the Iraq occupation was lack of support from other Arab nations. They do not want the United States to succeed in Iraq, but they also don’t want failure.

If America succeeds and Iraq becomes a prosperous democracy tomorrow, then America’s notion of pre-emption will be enforced, he said.

“Those countries don’t want us to win cheaply or easily.”

Telhami said if America fails, the ramifications would be frightening because other terrorist groups would be empowered to believed they too could take on the world’s superpower.

After spending 20 minutes stating the problem in Iraq, which mostly stemmed from misunderstandings, he spent 10 seconds stating the solution: “Persuade Arabs we have a different attitude of them than they have of us,” he said.