Kerry's Iraq War Votes
The L.A. Times
has a piece by Janet Hook, Mary Curtius and Greg Miller that tracks the rationale of Kerry's two war votes. Here's a relevant portion of that article:
Less than two days before the Senate vote Oct. 11, Kerry said his gut told him to vote for the resolution. But his speech on the Senate floor was riddled with reservations and caveats.
Despite the doubts he had expressed about the administration's commitment to diplomacy, Kerry said he would back the resolution on the strength of assurances from Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that they would not go to war unilaterally or without exhausting diplomatic options.
"Let there be no doubt or confusion," Kerry said. "I will support a multilateral effort to disarm [Hussein] by force, if we ever exhaust those other options as the president has promised. But I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible."
There was nothing in the resolution that guaranteed those conditions would be met. Nonetheless, he was one of 29 Democrats to vote for the resolution, which passed 77 to 23.
In his Senate speech, Kerry had said, "I will be among the first to speak out" if Bush failed to seek international support and go to war as a last resort.
One could argue that Kerry never should have trusted Bush and Powell. Or that, he should have read the intelligence briefing provided members of the senate, instead of just the executive summary of it. The summary argued there was clear evidence of WMD, but the briefing itself was full of caveats and differing interpretations of the evidence.
One could also argue that Kerry voted to give Bush the power to go to war, but prefaced his votes with caveats and conditions as a way to straddle the fence.
But here's a different interpretation. He voted for the war resolution as a patriot, suspending pure partisan politics because he believed the president deserved the benefit of the doubt. He voted to authorize the war, despite the resolution not having the conditions he sought that diplomacy be exhausted, because he believed the president needed the threat of war to make diplomacy work. He suspend disblief and accepted the words of Powell and Bush.
And diplomacy was working. Inspections were allowed; Iraq issued an accounting of its WMD. There was no longer any immediate need to rush to war when Bush did. But Bush did rush to war and Kerry did call him on it according to the LA Times article. He began criticizing Bush's march to war in December, a month later. And kept up that criticism. This was well before Howard Dean was a factor in the campaign. Finally, reports the Times, in fall of 2003 he voted against the $87-billion. Here's how that's viewed:
Critics say Kerry's vote was politically motivated. The surprise leader in the Democratic presidential race had become Dean, who was riding a strong tide of antiwar sentiment among party activists.
Kerry said he voted against the bill because Bush had gone to war recklessly and without a plan for postwar Iraq. He called it a "principled" vote designed to pressure the administration to change its policies.
The question everyone's asking is how Kerry could vote against the $87-billion financing bill and still support the troops. As some of his senate colleagues predicted would happen when he made the vote, the republicans are using the vote against the $87-billion to attack Kerry as a flip-flopper and as someone who doesn't support our troops. They also say Kerry's a political opportunist.
But if he's such a political opportunist, wouldn't the smart play have been to have voted for the $87-billion, and to have done so in a flourish of rhetoric praising our troops. Even Howard Dean had come to the realization that we couldn't simply walk out of Iraq and leave it a mess. Kerry could have made that argument at the time.
Kerry also knew the bill was going to overwhelmingly pass, that a vote against it would be unpopular.
Of course, the counter argument is that at the time, in the heat of the primaries and in the face of Dean's campaign, the first consideration was stopping the bleeding and throwing a sop to the leftist democrats who seemed to be driving the primary dynamics.
But let me tell you, I am a leftist democrat and Kerry's vote didn't impress me, or many others, as an act of coming around. It was too little too late. It gained Kerry nothing. And he had to know that it wouldn't really help. So why'd he do it?
The only logical reason is that he believed it was important to send Bush a message. Kerry's real problem was trusting Bush and not looking more carefully at the evidence before the war authorization vote. But he did lay the ground work for what his continued support would be, and he did stick to that ground work later, when the $87-billion was asked for.
The damn problem with Kerry is that he can't admit the first vote was a mistake nor explain that second vote took some political courage. At least he hasn't been able to do that to date.
He didn't address the votes in the conventions, and he's not running ads that will address now because his campaign is suspending ads for a long month. So if he's going to address this issue, and he has to well before the republican convention, he's going to need a setting that's public and that will build a good sound bite that the news media will cover and the pundits will stoke for a while. Otherwise, it's all left hanging on the debates.
