If we hadn't strangled democracy at birth in Iraq, by voiding the spontaneous local elections, we could hve followed a program of letting democracy grow from the local level up to the provincial and then the national. And as we did so, we could have incorporated Iraqis into the international coalition occupation forces, in order to slowly turn the nation's security over to its own people.

It would be a slow process; the schedule I came up with would have ended our occupation of Iraq this year, but it should certainly be more peaceful than what we actually did. Not just because we wouldn't have incensed the Iraqis in the first place, but because they would have been making steady progress toward self-government and self-sufficiency the whole time, rather than having the whole untamed situation dropped in their lap at once.

Tim Johnson's brain problem kept him out of work in 2007, not 2009, so he's not a factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#Senate gives the timeline that we're concerned with. The timeline does not show whether Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were showing up to vote. Kennedy stopped voting in March 2009. Byrd was in the hospital from May 18th to Jun 30th, and he died slightly less than a year later. There was also stuff going on with Roland Burris, Al Franken, and Arlen Specter.