[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: About That Iraq Vote

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About That Iraq Vote

August 15, 2004
 


 

Senator John Kerry's Iraq vote is going to haunt him
throughout the presidential campaign, no matter how he
explains it. That does not keep us from wishing that Mr.
Kerry would do a better job with the issue. 

Mr. Kerry, as almost everyone now knows, voted to give
President Bush the authority to invade Iraq, in a post-9/11
climate of fear and widespread conviction that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that might be used
against the United States or its allies in the near future.
Now that we know differently, some senators have said they
regret their vote. Not Mr. Kerry. He affirmed once again
last week that he believes he did the right thing. It was
Mr. Bush who erred, he continued, by misusing the power he
had been given. 

The president gleefully seized on the remark as evidence
that his opponent agrees that he was right "to go into Iraq
and remove Saddam Hussein from power." That is not exactly
what Mr. Kerry said. He - and many other Democrats - say
that the White House asked for the vote as a way of
strengthening Mr. Bush's hand in negotiations with the
United Nations, but that they were betrayed when the
president went ahead and launched an invasion without broad
international support. 

We're sure Mr. Kerry is right in claiming that the White
House, in its negotiations with the Senate, played down the
possibility that the vote would lead to actual conflict.
That does not mean the public will be satisfied with an
explanation that he authorized an invasion under the
presumption it would not happen. After nearly two years of
working with the Bush administration, Congress had a very
good idea of how Mr. Bush viewed the world, what advisers
he listened to, and what he was likely to do with American
troops if Congress gave him a broad authorization to go to
war. It was for precisely that reason that some senators,
led by Joseph Biden and Richard Lugar, struggled
unsuccessfully to narrow down the resolution. Senator Biden
says Senator Kerry worked with him behind the scenes. 

But for the most part Mr. Kerry, who voted against the
first Persian Gulf war, tailored his positions on this one
to his presidential ambitions. He was more hawkish when the
leading candidate for the Democratic nomination seemed to
be Richard Gephardt, and more dovish when Howard Dean
picked up momentum. At the height of the Dean insurgency,
both Mr. Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, decided
to oppose spending $87 billion to underwrite the occupation
of Iraq that they both voted to authorize. 

The Republicans have made much of this record; the Kerry
campaign is haunted by replays of the theme song from the
old TV show "Flipper." Mr. Bush, however, has a far more
dangerous pattern of behavior. On issues from tax cuts to
foreign policy, the president tends to stick stubbornly to
his original course even when changing events cry out for
adaptation. His explanations seem to evolve every day, but
his thinking never does. 

What we would like to hear from Mr. Kerry is how the events
of the last year have changed his own thinking. He
consistently describes the failures of Iraq as failures in
tactics - from a lack of international support to a lack of
adequate body armor for the troops. We're wondering if he
really believes better planning or better diplomacy would
have made the difference, or whether the whole idea of
sending troops was flawed. Arab nations have a painful
history of Western colonization, and there is an
instinctive resistance to the idea of a Western occupation
of Arab soil. How much does Mr. Kerry think the addition of
French and German soldiers would have improved things? In
retrospect, it seems that even if Arab nations like Saudi
Arabia or Egypt had added their support, the outcome would
have more likely been trouble for the governments of those
countries back home rather than credibility on the streets
of Baghdad. 

There are undoubtedly circumstances that call for military
action, but we would like to know whether, as president,
John Kerry would insist on a higher threshold than he
settled for as an opportunistic senator in 2002. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/opinion/15sun1.html?ex=1093600268&ei=1&en=fc109e44946eeeaa


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