By Bill Forry

Second in a series examining the positions and reaction of Dorchester's Congressional delegation to the war in Iraq.

Mike Capuano was running late. A rainy Wednesday evening tacked an extra hour onto what should have been a 20-minute ride from Cambridge to Codman Square, where a group of about 30 neighborhood activists were waiting patiently.

The no-nonsense former mayor of Somerville strode into the Great Hall, shook a hand or two and made straight for the podium. After a brief apology and a promise to get everyone out of there in time for dinner, Capuano launched right into his stump speech.

"Basically, everything in Washington right now is about the election," Capuano said matter-of-factly on April 14. "We all know how tight the elections are going to be. And I believe this election is the most important election we've had since Vietnam. It's about the heart and soul of the country."

The Vietnam reference was no slip of the tongue. Capuano, who voted against the October 2002 resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq the following spring, has been one of the state's most outspoken critics of the war. Even in February 2003, as he toured American bases in Kuwait and Afghanistan (a country he did vote to send troops into in November 2001), Capuano warned of an ominous future in the Persian Gulf.

"I think the president's wrong and should bring them home," Capuano told the Reporter upon his return to Boston last winter.

Since then, Capuano has stepped up his plain-spoken rhetoric. At the Great Hall, when quizzed by a Dorchester constituent about Iraq, Capuano was charateristically blunt.

"I think we're in Iraq because [Bush] really thought it was good politics," Capuano told the crowd. "I think he misled the American people and many members of Congress in his march to war."

"I don't think for a minute [Bush] knew 9-11 was going to happen and let it happen. I believe him when he says he'd have moved heaven and earth. My concern is with what he has done since 9-11."

The war in Iraq is just one area in which the third-term Congressman finds fault with the present administration. During his remarks in Codman Square, Capuano ripped Bush and the GOP on everything from raiding Medicare coffers and slashing Section 8 certificates to making non-profit volunteer hours mandatory for people who live in public housing. Ideologically speaking, Capuano is a classic big-city Democrat, still mortified by the nation's lurch to the right and mystified by his constituents failure to balance things out at the ballot box.

"The people we represent don't vote," Capuano told the Codman Square crowd. "I don't know why. I'm angry. I'm mad as hell."

Capuano will never be confused with a stereotypical back-slapping pol. Instead he tells his Codman Square constituents that he spends more time in their part of the district because people here "need me more."

But, he warns, "if I get in a street fight tomorrow with some multi-millionaire, you may not see me for a while."

Capuano's candor can trek close to "the line" at times, such as the exchage he had with one elderly woman in the front row, who challenged him on his explanation of the current Medicare funding crisis.

"Our Social Security money was being spent long before George Bush," the woman offered.

"When George Bush took office we had the first surplus in a generation," Capuano countered. "The moment he got into office he got us back on the wrong track."

Still protesting, the elderly woman insisted that the Democrats had to share blame for the anticipated shortfalls.

"We stopped it. I guarantee you, on my father's grave," Capuano said. "It was only for a year, but we stopped it. Now, [Bush] cut taxes and we're back into the largest deficit in modern American history.

"You'll be here in a few years," Capuano told the woman. "If nothing changes [Social Security] will be gone in ten years. What they're doing is just getting rid of it."

Hardly a dove, Capuano's anti-war stance is strictly Iraq-focused and comes with caveats. He's not in favor of an immediate American pull-out and says he has no clear idea of how the US can extricate itself from the region. He voted to go into Afghanistan and stands by that decision, saying that "I do agree with the concept of preemption. The problem I have is, 'Where do you draw the line.'"

Asked directly at the Codman Square forum about what to do next in Iraq, Capuano answered: "I don't know. We're in it, we've destroyed everything. It's irresponsible to march out today."

This week, Capuano echoed that theme, adding that he is in favor of "giving the military whatever it needs to keep the people we have over there safe."

"I do not think it would be wise to pull out now," Capuano told the Reporter in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I've always believed once you break it, you own it. We made a humungous mistake going in. But we have a larger obligation."

Capuano has been among the chorus of Democratic voices excoriating the Bush administration for failing to properly equip American troops who are in-theater. Last summer, Capuano pressed for safer, more heavily-fortified vehicles, noting that many US casualties are coming in the form of attacks with improvised roadside explosives, like the one that killed Dorchester native Sergeant Daniel J. Londono last month.

"(The situation) has progressed but has not totally been alleviated. With all the money they had at the State Department, there is no excuse for it. I'm shocked that no one has been called to task for it."

The absence of any weapons of mass destruction in the country, Capuano adds, confirmed his earlier judgment that Hussein- while a brutal dictator- posed no imminent threat to US interests.

"The main reason I voted against this was I was never convinced that we were in danger. I'm 90 percent through the Woodward book ("Plan of Attack") and all that does is confirm to me my fears and suspicions.They couldn't even make the case within their own administration.

"I've never understood how anyone could look at the information and come to the conclusion that we were in danger," Capuano says. "If we had been told then that the whole thing was getting rid of Hussein - I wouldn't have voted to send troops- but that's fair. They're trying to re-write history."