Midchuck commented:

What's been suggested above is that maybe they did. If enough people were offended by his behavior to decide that Democrats in general were an immoral lot, that it pushed the election to Bush (or into a mess that was eventually resolved in Bush's favor, for whatever reason), then you could argue that his behaviour was an indirect cause of the Iraq war (the present one, I mean). Farfetched, but you could argue it.

There's a concept in legal proof called "proximate cause". Your scenario fails that test.

If Joe Blow is in an accident while driving legal speeds, but it's shown that he was where he was only because he had been speeding for forty minutes an hour before, that's evidence of negligence at the time of the speeding, but that's not proximate cause of the accident.

The "if you hadn't done X, the Y situation couldn't have come up, so you're to blame for Z" argument won't fly.

Dave Oesterreich