While the Boston Globe is rummaging through genealogical archives, Kerry is trying to figure out what his convictions are.
TRB FROM WASHINGTON
No Vote
by Peter Beinart
Post date: 01.31.03
Issue date: 02.10.03
So far, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has run a near-flawless presidential campaign. He has raised tons of money, locked up scores of seasoned advisers, and heartened timid Democrats by challenging President George W. Bush early and often on national security. Perhaps most importantly, he has started to remake his image. Once derided as calculating and aloof, Kerry is reinventing himself in the John McCain mold: as a straight-talking, tell-it-like-it-is, regular guy (see "The Makeover," by Michael Crowley, June 3, 2002).
But that effort is doomed to fail if Kerry keeps speaking so dishonestly about Iraq. In early October of last year, Kerry--already a de facto presidential candidate--faced a difficult choice. The president was pushing a Senate resolution giving himself virtually unrestricted authorization to wage war against Iraq. For Kerry, voting yes could prove dangerous in the Democratic primary--given the skepticism of Democratic voters toward a war with Saddam Hussein and their outright hostility toward a war conducted outside U.N. auspices. But voting no could prove dangerous in a general election against President Bush--who would use the vote, combined with Kerry's opposition to the first Gulf war, to paint the Massachusetts senator as Dukakis II, a weak-on-national-security liberal.
Facing a similar dilemma, Kerry's presidential rival Senator Joseph Lieberman voted to give Bush unfettered warmaking authority--and he is now paying the political price, especially in pacifist Iowa, where his chances of winning the state's caucuses are considered slim to none. Michigan's Senator Carl Levin and 17 other Democrats voted against giving Bush such sweeping powers. Instead, they supported a much narrower resolution, which tied Senate authorization to authorization from the United Nations.
Kerry voted for the broader resolution and against the narrower one--thus avoiding a problem in the general election and potentially creating one in the Democratic primary. And, in the nearly four months since, he has dealt with this potential problem by doing something remarkable: He has pretended the vote never happened. The resolution that the Senate passed--and Kerry supported--encouraged Bush to work with the United Nations, but it required him to do nothing more than alert Congress 48 hours after initiating hostilities and report to Congress every 60 days after that. West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who opposed the measure, accurately described it as "handing the president unchecked authority." But Kerry said exactly the opposite. Two days after the vote, he visited Tucson, where he told a Democratic group, "Don't for an instant think the president has some great free hand." He went on to say, "If the president of the United States decides to go [to war] unilaterally, I think it would be one of the great catastrophes and mistakes of our time." It was a rather astonishing statement for a man who had just voted to grant the president the authority to do exactly that.
As the months have passed, the discrepancy between Kerry's description of his position on war with Iraq and his actual position, as manifested in his Senate vote, has only grown wider. Interviewed on "Meet the Press" on December 1, 2002, the man who voted to authorize unilateral war flatly stated, "I will not support the president to proceed unilaterally." In a foreign policy speech last week at Georgetown University, Kerry said, "The United States should never go to war because it wants to; the United States should go to war because we have to. And we don't have to until we have exhausted the remedies available, built legitimacy, and earned the consent of the American people, absent, of course, an imminent threat requiring urgent action." Given that Kerry clearly doesn't perceive an imminent threat, his call for the administration to exhaust "the remedies available" implies that the president shouldn't go to war without giving the U.N. inspections more of a chance.
But, of course, Kerry refused to condition his Senate vote on this kind of stipulation. And his call for giving inspections more time is a little disingenuous. "Show the world some appropriate patience in building a genuine coalition," Kerry thundered a few sentences later. "Mr. President, do not rush to war." But if the United States plans to fight a war, it has to rush--military experts say that in roughly two months the desert heat will make fighting impossible. The Bush administration can hold off for a few weeks, as it has signaled it might. But it is unlikely the weapons inspectors will find anything during that period to sway China, France, Germany, and Russia, thus creating the "genuine coalition" Kerry demands. More likely, Saddam will continue to cooperate just enough to avoid an outright confrontation with inspectors and obstruct just enough to make sure they find nothing important. And thus, in mid-February, the United States will face the same dilemma it faces today. Lieberman's answer to that dilemma is clear--he's prepared to go to war without U.N. sanction if necessary. Kerry's speeches, by contrast, suggest either that he hasn't decided whether he'd support such an attack or that he'd oppose it. What he doesn't say is that he has already voted on such an eventuality--and given it the green light.
In addition to international support, Kerry says the Bush administration should hold off on war until it gains greater domestic backing. At Georgetown, Kerry said the administration shouldn't attack until it has "built legitimacy and earned the consent of the American people." In recent weeks, this suggestion that the United States should not go to war while public opinion remains divided has become a familiar mantra among doves in Congress and in the media. This despite the fact that the first President Bush launched the highly successful Gulf war with less public support than his son has for this one and that Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson launched the disastrous Vietnam War with overwhelming public approval. But it is a particularly strange argument to hear from Kerry. The Massachusetts senator says President Bush needs the "consent of the American people." But, in a representative democracy, the people consent to policies not through Gallup but through their elected representatives. By voting for the president's war resolution, Kerry and a majority of his fellow members of Congress consented on the people's behalf. As it happens, the voters seem to have endorsed that position at the polls a month later. But if Kerry didn't believe Bush had won the public's consent for war, why on earth did he offer it?
It's not hard to understand why Kerry is pretending he never voted for unilateral war. Kerry's staff must look with pity on their naïve competitor Lieberman, whose unambiguous hawkishness has left him well to the right of many of the Democratic activists he needs to woo. But then at least those activists know what Lieberman believes about the most important issue facing the United States today. No one could say the same right now about Kerry.
Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
Copyright 2002, The New Republic
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