Kerry keeps defending war vote to his own detriment
By PHILIP GAILEY
Published August 22, 2004
Why can't John Kerry admit what even some Republicans now recognize - that going to war in Iraq was a mistake?
In response to goading from President Bush on whether he regrets his vote to go to war, Kerry said recently he would not change his vote even if he had known then what he knows now - that Saddam Hussein's regime posed no immediate security threat and had no weapons of mass destruction.
Kerry has never looked worse in defending his war vote than he did in taking the president's bait. You don't have to be a profile in courage to say the war, in retrospect, was unjustified and a costly mistake. Kerry should read the letter U.S. Rep. Doug Bereuter, a Nebraska Republican who is leaving Congress later this month after 13 years of service, recently sent to his constituents saying he now realizes that going to war in Iraq was unjustified and has created "a dangerous, costly mess.".
Like Kerry, Bereuter voted to give Bush the authority to take the country to war based on intelligence that has since been proven faulty or skewed. But unlike Kerry, the congressman felt that he owed voters in his district an honest assessment and explanation.
Knowing what he knows now, Bereuter wrote, "I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified."
He continued: "I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action, especially without a broad and engaged international coalition. The cost in casualties is already large and growing, and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible. Our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened . . . Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world."
This is the answer many Americans would like to hear from John Kerry. However, Kerry would rather talk about Vietnam than Iraq, and that may be a political mistake the way public opinion is moving.
Kerry has made his Vietnam service the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, and now he is coming under sleazy attack from a group of Republican-financed veterans of that bitterly divisive war who are accusing Kerry of lying about his war record. It's a new low for Kerry's critics. All fair-minded Americans need to know is that John Kerry volunteered to go to Vietnam when other privileged young men were doing everything they could to avoid going, and during the four months he was there, the young Navy officer and swift boat commander was awarded a bunch of medals, including three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.
Kerry is slogging through the wrong war in this election. It's Iraq, stupid, and on that battlefront the Massachusetts senator has been on the defensive from the start. With polls finding that the Iraq war could be the pivotal issue in this presidential election, Kerry is still struggling to convince voters he offers a credible alternative to Bush's Iraq policy.
Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations released poll results suggesting that Kerry has been unable to take full advantage of the public's disapproval of Bush's handling of the war. "Barring a sizable shift in public opinion over the next few months," according to a Pew analysis of the poll, "the 2004 election will be the first since the Vietnam era in which foreign affairs and national security issues are a higher priority than the economy."
In an interview with the Washington Post, Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said: "Iraq could be the tipping point. But even though things are bad in Iraq and the public evaluates President Bush poorly on Iraq, Kerry hasn't made the sale on Iraq, either."
It's no wonder. The more Kerry tries to defend his war vote, the worse he comes across to voters who are still waiting to hear how a Kerry administration would extract U.S. forces from the quagmire in Iraq. Kerry's attempts to explain himself have been inconsistent, confusing and at times incoherent. When it seemed the politically popular thing to do, Kerry voted to go to war. Then, when the war became politically unpopular among Democratic primary voters, he turned around and voted against funding for military and reconstruction operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He says he has a plan to bring our troops home, but refuses to let voters in on it.
To the dismay of many of his own supporters, Kerry simply can't bring himself to admit that going to war was a mistake. That cannot be reassuring to voters looking for a principled alternative to Bush's belligerent foreign policy.
