Kerry Stump-mate Kennedy Blast Bush on Iraq: Time to Think Kerry Again

[WiseMen]

On C-Span today, Kennedy carried on his campaign against Bush regime and in support of John Kerry with a comprehensive and blistering attack on the Administration’s use of “misguided ideology and distortions of the truth” to take the nation to way.

Kennedy praised Paul O’Neill’s courage and slammed the White House’s “vindictive and mean-spirited” attack against Joe Wilson’s wife, and against secretary O’Neill.

This is the same Kennedy who is stumping in the frigid climes of IOWA and New Hampshire for John F. Kerry. Kennedy, like the most of us anti-war democrats, was disappointed at Kerry’s IWR vote. But he accepted his decision based on Kerry’s long record as the “Tough Dove” – fiercely opposing the corrupt use of American military force, but unflinching when he though force was absolutely necessary. Kennedy says he view Kerry’s vote as not a vote for war, but a vote for U.N. enforcement. And it was intended to reach the same goal as his – a peaceful resolution of the Iraqi tragedy.

John Kerry could have voted “no” held to his leadership of the anti-war base among Party activist. But, for reasons of presidential politics, national policy, as well as concerns for precedent, a “yes” vote on the Iraq War Resolution could be seen the RIGHT VOTE for Kerry, presidential candidate and Senior Senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The following is my take on why John Kerry, the man of peace, took a fateful vote that allowed his opponents to label him a man of war. It is time for anti-war democrats to give Kerry another look.

Presidential Politics

Since Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan over the Iran Hostages, Dovishness has spelled doom in national political campaigns. Clinton chose Gore over Kerry as his 1992 running mate, reportedly because Kerry had opposed the first Gulf War while Gore had joined the Republicans to support it. Clinton had to compensate for his weak-on-defense image.

Curiously enough, Kerry opposed the Gulf war because he saw U.S. militarization of the region as a potential long-term disaster. Kerry had led the investigation of the Reagan/Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld duplicitous involvement in the Iran-Iraq War during the 80's and saw that the Gulf conflict was not just avoidable, but a war that should be avoided.

Al Gore, supported by a few conservative democrats such as Governor Dean, voted for that War: a war that desecrated the Muslim Holy Lands, turned the formerly pro-U.S. Islamic radicals into Anti-American Jihadist and led more than a decade of death and tragedy for people in the region. But that vote for war qualified him to be Vice President of the United States.

Kerry, the Senator, could have voted NO to register his distrust of Bush regime intentions. Kerry, the Presidential Candidate, had to give deference to the word of the sitting President and consider Democratic vulnerabilities in ’04. He had to vote “YES.”

Policy

For more than a decade Kerry had broken with liberal non-interventionism and argued for a proactive U.S. foreign policy to address world humanitarian crises, WMD proliferation, and global terrorism. In his book, “The New War,” (1997), Kerry pulls together insights from 3 terms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a decade as Chairman or Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. He argued forcefully for a realignment of U.S. military and intelligence posture to defend against new threats to U.S. global interests and national infrastructure and called for urgent preemptive executive action, warning: "It will take only one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change the world in a single day."

On the campaign trail Kerry stated the policy position that led to his difficult IWR vote:


"Americans deserve better than a false choice between force without diplomacy and diplomacy without force.
We need to take the third path in foreign policy – not a hard unilateralism or a soft isolationism – but a bold, progressive internationalism – backed by undoubted military might – that commits America to lead in the cause of human liberty and prosperity.
If Democrats do not stand for making America safer, stronger, and more secure, we won't win back the White House – and we won't deserve to."

-- John Kerry, December 16, 2003


Precedent

John Kerry led the anti-Vietnam war movement not as a pacifist, but as a war hero who, after 6 years in combat, came to question the morality of U.S. military tactics and the justice of American policy for the region. Since Vietnam, Kerry has supported the principled use of force and has backed U.S. military ventures, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Somalia and Haiti. In Bosnia, Kerry supported covert action to oppose “ethnic cleansing.” In Kosovo, he went further than the Clinton administration, arguing (on the side of NATO Supreme Commander, Wesley Clark, incidentally) that ground troops should remain as an option for stopping former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's violent crackdown on the Serbian province's ethnic Albanian majority.
Precedent regarding Saddam Hussein could not be clearer. While, Kerry opposed the main resolution authorizing force in the Persian Gulf in 1991, he has since criticized both former President Clinton and his successor, President Bush, for missed opportunities to return inspectors to Iraq to end the risk of Iraqi WMD proliferation.
In 1998 Kerry joined John McCain to argue for forceful and effective action, covert or otherwise, to enforce U.N. inspections or remove the Saddam regime. In a Feb. 23, 1998 press release on the Iraq dilemma Kerry stated:

“This is the first issue of proliferation in the post Cold War period. It is imperative for us as a nation to stand our ground and for the Western world to make it clear that we cannot allow by any nation to possess and use those kinds of weapons.”
Given this precedent, a vote against Bush’s September, 2002, Iraq War Resolution, in this post-9/11 national security environment, would have exposed Kerry to a charge of enormous hypocrisy and partisan demagoguery.

In voting “yes” on the IWR Kerry said he had to trust the President of the United States when he said that war would be “a last resort”. He may have been very wrong to do that, but the time of the vote, in a substantial, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor, Kerry said he would strongly opposed any unilateral movement to war and that he did not believe that Saddam’s threat was yet imminent. He kept is word and faithfully led opposition to unilateral action during the U.N. debates, Bush’s “rush to war,” and the administration’s duplicitous and inept foreign policy.

Conclusion

Given his record of fighting for peace, I find it truly infuriating that so many democrats are willing to make vicious remarks regarding Kerry’s IWR vote. Infuriating because these remarks show so little consciousness of the U.S. role in the region, so little guilt regarding complicity in the Iraqi tragedy, the millions dead, the abominable poisons that fell on the enemies of Saddam with U.S. acquiescence -- and for U.S. geopolitical goals. It is infuriating that these newly minted minions of a newly reborn peace-marcher can see only black or white. They cannot understand that, as much as it was atrociously criminal to do what the Bush did in 2003, it may have been just as evil to do nothing, but maintain people-punishing sanctions while the multi-decade reign of atrocities of “our man in Bagdad” continued. There was a better way, different from the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld way, and that is what John Kerry voted for.

John Kerry has been handed the lot of a fighter for most of his adult life. With his vote for the IWR Kerry risked his presumptive right to lead a campaign for which he as prepared for a lifetime -- a campaign to overthrow the Bush regime.

At the same time, John Kerry knows that that same vote, in which he gave a republican President the benefit of the doubt, could be part of a necessary armor against the republican onslaught, should he, against all odds, end up as the standard-bearer for the Party in the ’04 election.