Rice and DiceJohn Kerry nails Condoleezza Rice on Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005, at 8:20 PM ET
Twenty minutes into Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings this morning, John Kerry entered the chamber and took his seat as the fourth-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no doubt poignantly aware that, had 60,000 citizens switched their votes in Ohio, he wouldn't have to wait in line to speak anywhere, much less put up with back-bench Republicans smirking and joking about how happy they are to see his return to the committee.
Not since 1972 has the loser of a presidential election held on to a post of power afterward, so there was some anticipation over how Kerry would handle these hearings—his first official, public confrontation with such a tangible token of his defeat. Would he be aggressive in his questioning, or lean over backward to be conciliatory and polite? If his performance is a signal of how he views this new phase of his career, he'll probably be abandoning the back-seat deference that he's often displayed the past two decades as the junior senator from Massachusetts.
Kerry didn't play the Democrats' bulldog—that role had been assigned to Sen. Barbara Boxer, who assumed it later in the morning with venom—but he did strike the demeanor of a stern, dismayed taskmaster. He recited the common wisdom that Rice's confirmation was assured, but added that she might not get his vote. "I have reservations," he said, as if in a tone of regret.
Snip...
Kerry, who had recently returned from a trip to Iraq, found Rice's reply "disturbing," and not just because it marked another instance of the Bush administration's refusal to admit mistakes. There was nothing "unforeseen" about the insurgents' re-emergence, he said. The U.S. military "encouraged" them to vanish from the battlefield, promising to pay them if they did so. "But we didn't pay them," Kerry said. So "they got angry and organized."
This is an oversimplified view of the insurgency, but it has some validity. Certainly it rebuts Rice's explanation of the insurgency as the result of an all-too-speedy victory by U.S.-led forces (or, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has described it, a "catastrophic success"). Kerry's argument also speaks to a broader failure of Bush's policy in Iraq—a failure to come to grips with the internal, sectarian tensions unleashed by the removal of Saddam's oppressive regime.
Rice replied that the insurgents are angry not because we didn't pay them, but because "they've lost power and they want it back." Kerry agreed, but noted that's precisely the point. In the Iraqi election, still scheduled for Jan. 30, the Shiite parties are going to win, and win big, partly because Shiites comprise a strong majority of Iraq's population, partly because—owing mainly to poor security and insurgents' threats—few Sunnis are likely to vote. Kerry asked: What is the administration going to do, right after the election, to help reconcile the sectarian factions and thus stave off a potential civil war?
Snip...
One remark in particular raised the possibility that Kerry might emerge, in Bush's second term, as an insistent critic of the president's war policy. "Our troops are stunning, superb," Kerry said, but "they're going on missions that are questionable in terms of what they're going to achieve." Was it by chance or intention that this statement—more than anything Kerry has uttered publicly in the last 30 years—stirred memories of the famous line during his testimony before this same committee in 1971, as a protesting Vietnam veteran: "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
http://www.slate.com/id/2112386 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
