John Kerry's position on Iraq ... Must reading
.......... Many would call Kerry's position on Iraq subtle, deep, or erudite. I believe it's fairly clear.
The following two articles bear careful reading.
TALKING POINTS MEMO
By Joshua Micah Marshall
August 14, 2004
Every working journalist should read this Kevin Drum post on John Kerry's position on the Iraq war and the Iraq war resolution. It's sad, but perhaps predictable, to see so many members of the print and electronic press getting led around by the nose by the Bush crew on this one.
I think I've demurred from discussing or rather defending Kerry's position on this issue because I have an element of bias, since it is also my position. But as Kevin notes, whether or not you agree with that position, it is really not difficult to understand so long as you are not being willfully obtuse.
Sometimes in baseball a batter decides to take a pitch. He's decided in advance that he's not going to swing no matter what comes down the pike. But in most cases, when a batter steps up to the plate, he doesn't decide whether he's going to swing until he sees the pitch. Only an idiot decides in advance not knowing what he's going to face. And yet this is roughly what the Bush camp says was the only reasonable, or I suppose manly, approach to the Iraq war.
I see the war decision in very similar terms to this baseball analogy. Voting for the war resolution was not remotely the same thing as going to war at the first possible opportunity.
Forcing inspections meant seeing what inspections would yield. And seeing what inspections would yield was the best insurance against getting ourselves into the current situation and finding that the WMD, which constituted the premise for the whole endeavor, didn't even exist.
To extend our baseball analogy, Bush went to the plate knowing he was going to swing at whatever pitch he got.
I've been sketching out notes recently for a retrospective essay on the lead-up to the Iraq war, trying to capture on paper the mood of those months, to think through particularly where I think I saw things correctly and where I went wrong. And it's brought into some perspective for me the silliness of the argument the president makes about the war resolution and the point he means to convey when he says that everyone thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
The point he's trying to make in the latter instance is that you can't blame him for the mess we're in because everybody (or, for these purposes, almost all the leading political figures in Washington) thought Saddam had at least some chemical and biological weapons, and thus everyone else would have gotten us to this same point. But here of course is the beauty of actually taking the WMD issue seriously as opposed to merely using it as a cudgel and a pretext as the president did.
One might well have gone into the whole drama thinking Iraq had a retooled WMD program. But inspections allowed us actually to find out. Not just to guess, but to find out, to know. Certainly inspections would not have been perfect. But they were quite good at answering the key question, which was the status of the Iraqi nuclear program. And they would have been good enough at gauging where other non-conventional weapons programs were too.
(The great undiscussed matter in this whole debate is that well before we pulled the trigger in March 2003 it was quite clear from the IAEA inspections that there was no Iraqi nuclear program to speak of.)
In any case, all of this is merely a too-lengthy way of noting that giving the president the authority and the muscle to force the inspectors back into Iraq (i.e., giving him the authority to go to war if they were not allowed back in) simply cannot be equated with giving the president the go-ahead to game the process and go to war immediately even if they were allowed in.
That doesn't mean that Kerry is in the clear on any legitimate criticism. But ironically the best argument against Kerry's position is one that is simply off-limits to the president -- namely, that Kerry should have or perhaps did know that the president was lying when he said he needed the muscle of the resolution to force the inspectors back in and have some hope of settling the crisis short of war.
The president was dishonest with the world and dishonest with the American people. He gamed the process and it blew up in his face -- though with a long fuse. By any reasonable moral reckoning he deserves all the comeuppance of his bad faith. The tragedy is that the American people, the folks he scammed, have to suffer the brunt of the tragedy and will continue to do so long after he is, hopefully, tossed out of office in just less than a dozen weeks.
-- Josh Marshall
Copyright 2004 Joshua Micah Marshall
talkingpointsmemo.com
______________________________________________________
POLITICAL ANIMAL
By Kevin Drum, formerly of Calpundit
August 14, 2004
Washington Monthly
KERRY AND IRAQ....Bob Somerby, in his usual tolerant and long-suffering way, is a wee bit upset with press coverage of John Kerry's position on the Iraq war:
What is Kerry's stand on Iraq? Readers, get ready for some real brain-work! Here goes: Kerry says Bush should have had the authority to go to war, but then went to war prematurely. Wow! Have you finished scratching your heads about all the nuance involved in that statement?
In fairness, let's all admit that Kerry is not exactly a wizard at making his positions clear and unequivocal. He does bring some of this on himself.
Still, Bob is right: Kerry might not be the best speaker in the world, but his position on the war has been pretty consistent all along. Even William Saletan, the best known critic of Kerry's "caveats and curlicues," came to the same conclusion after examining a Republican video of Kerry's supposed flip-flops on Iraq: the RNC video carefully edits Kerry's quotes to make them look inconsistent, but in fact every one of them tells the same story. He summarized the RNC clips in a Slate article on Thursday:
Kerry wants pressure and inspections....doubts Iraq would comply with inspections, but he thinks we have to go through the process of trying....doesn't like the way Bush is pursuing the goal, particularly because it "alienated our allies."
....consistent with Kerry's previous statements calling for "heat," "inspections," "process," and cooperation with "allies."....No conflict here....voting to turn up the heat and get compliance with inspections....Bush betrayed two of Kerry's principles: process and allies....it isn't a change of position.
....This is the same position Kerry has stated all along: compliance, inspections, skepticism, process....There you have it. Edwards says if Kerry had been president, we would have found out Iraq had no WMD, and "we would never be in this place." Kerry emphatically agrees with this translation.
You can decide for yourself whether you like this position, but it's not hard to grasp. That's especially true for the press, since they know very well that there are lots and lots of liberal hawks and other former war supporters who have exactly the same position: pressuring Saddam was good, inspections were good, and eventually war might have been good too.
But Bush blew it: he failed to rally world opinion, he failed to get the Arab world on our side, he failed to let the inspections process run its course, and he failed to plan properly for the postwar occupation. The result is a loss of American power and prestige, a diminished chance of Iraq becoming a pluralistic democracy, and an al-Qaeda that's been given a second lease on life thanks to George Bush's Queeg-like obsession with Saddam Hussein.
Not so hard to understand at all.
washingtonmonthly.com |
