James Taranto does a little reprise of Kerry's consistency on the Iraq issue in today's WSJ:
Kerry*, meanwhile, declared, "We cannot have it both ways in the war in Iraq." Here is a partial list of the positions Kerry has taken on the war in Iraq:
o "The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last four years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for four years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation."--Oct. 9, 2002
o "Yea."--vote on authorizing military force to liberate Iraq, Oct. 12, 2002
o "Even having botched the diplomacy, it is the duty of any president, in the final analysis, to defend this nation and dispel the security threat. . . . Saddam Hussein has brought military action upon himself by refusing for 12 years to comply with the mandates of the United Nations."--March 18, 2003
o "The vote is the vote. I voted to authorize. It was the right vote, and the reason I mentioned the threat is that we gave the--we had to give life to the threat. If there wasn't a legitimate threat, Saddam Hussein was not going to allow inspectors in. Now, let me make two points if I may. Ed [Gordon] questioned my answer. The reason I can't tell you to a certainty whether the president misled us is because I don't have any clue what he really knew about it, or whether he was just reading what was put in front of him. And I have no knowledge whether or not this president was in depth--I just don't know that. And that's an honest answer, and there are serious suspicions about the level to which this president really was involved in asking the questions that he should've. With respect to the question of, you know, the vote--let's remember where we were. If there hadn't been a vote, we would never have had inspectors. And if we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes, and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat. So I think we did the right thing. I'm convinced we did."--Sept. 9, 2003
o "Nay."--vote on $87 billion to fund operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oct. 17, 2003
o "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."--March 16, 2004
o "The president made a mistake in invading Iraq."--Sept. 30, 2004
o "No."--answer to Jim Lehrer's question "Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?," Sept. 30, 2004
o " I was wrong to vote for that Iraqi resolution."--June 13, 2006
No wonder Kerry says you can't have it both ways--as nuanced as he is, he's had it at least half a dozen ways!
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The only consistency that is really consistent is Kerry's consistent attempt to associate himself with anything deemed a success and distance himself from anything deemed a failure. IOW, he consistently tries to have it both ways! |
