USA Today – Dean's words may be imprecise, but his views are consistent

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Less than five weeks before the Iowa caucuses, presidential politics are understandably hyperactive. But still it was stunning how quickly the capture of Saddam Hussein morphed into something quite different: a high-decibel debate among Democrats over Howard Dean's foreign policy views.

The Democrats out to topple Dean from his front-runner's perch divided into two camps. There were those who angrily attacked Dean by name (Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and Richard Gephardt) and those who preferred to draw their contrasts more subtly (John Edwards and Wesley Clark). But what united the former Vermont governor's mainstream opponents was the desperate conviction that the Iraq war, which had powered Dean's insurgency, would also prove to be his undoing.

The political problem, though, lay in defining the precise nature of Dean's vulnerability. Lieberman has consistently gone after him from the right, charging again Tuesday in New Hampshire that "with Howard Dean, Saddam would be in power." For his part, Kerry preferred to depict Dean as a political weather vane. "When America needed leadership on Iraq," Kerry declared in Iowa Tuesday, "Howard Dean was all over the lot with a lot of slogans and a lot less solutions."

…

During a lengthy conversation with Dean in mid-September 2002, about three weeks before the congressional vote on Iraq, I asked him directly whether he would support the resolution. "It's unlikely," Dean responded. "I haven't seen the wording, so I'll leave myself a little wiggle room, but it's very unlikely." At the time, Dean also warned about the danger that America might become bogged down in Iraq "for a long time, maybe 10 years" and suggested that the coming conflict would be "more like Vietnam than the first Gulf War."

Those comments certainly sounded like an anti-war candidate. And they are why Howard Dean, for better or worse politically, can rightly claim a degree of consistency as he fends off foreign policy attacks from both the left and the right in his drive for the nomination.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/shapiro/2003-12-16-hype_x.htm

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1. kick

:kick:

[Castilleja]

2. Thanks...

and a :kick:

[sandnsea]

3. That wasn' t his only interview

Perhaps Walter missed Dean on Meet the Press on Sept 29. How does Howard propose to do this without the threat of force? And we all know he supported Biden-Lugar which had a war mechanism in it. That is not being anti-war from the start. Kucinich didn't need any wiggle room, he knew exactly where he stood. Dean played both sides of the coin.

“Today (Saddam’s) very clearly looking like he’s going to resist a return of the inspectors,” Dean said Sunday. “That is not acceptable. He has got to allow the inspectors in, and if he doesn’t, then we will be in the position of having to intervene.”

“We should have done that in the first place, and we need to continue, as his father did, to build an international coalition to go after Saddam and make sure he does not have those weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

[chocolateeater]

4. Excellent post

O8) :toast: :kick: