Wash Post's Meyerson)Kerry Was Right (on pre-war & current) Iraq position

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1803&ncid=1803&e=4&u=/washpost/20040414/pl_washpost/a9757_2004apr13

Wash Post's Meyerson)Kerry Was Right (on pre-war & current) Iraq position

Wed Apr 14, 1:42 AM ET
By Harold Meyerson

Don't look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry's position on Iraq? <snip>

Bush has, with the greatest reluctance, moved closer to the policy that Kerry has been advocating all along: internationalizing the occupation. In his speech preceding his vote to authorize the war in the fall of 2002, Kerry stipulated that the success of any endeavor to remake Iraq depended on broad international involvement in that effort. Last September Kerry called for Bush to transfer authority in post-Hussein Iraq to the United Nations, as that would "enhance the credibility and legitimacy" of the campaign to create a new Iraqi order in the eyes of Iraq's citizens and the world. And campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry suggested that Brahimi should supplant Bremer altogether, because the U.N. envoy would strike Iraqis as a more credible administrator of the occupation than Bremer could be.


Republican strategists have argued that the president would run circles around Kerry on issues of foreign policy -- a challenge to which Kerry's ad nauseam response during the primaries was, "Bring it on!" Now events have indeed brought it on, and it's clear that Kerry's apprehensions about a unilateral war and occupation were well-grounded, even as Bush's cavalier hopes for an all-American nation-building project were the most dangerous of fantasies. It's also clear that Bush has been forced by events to move, kicking and screaming, toward Kerry's vision of the requirements for a successful occupation. On the centerpiece of that vision -- handing over control of the occupation to the United Nations -- Bush has remained, seeking instead to get maximum U.N. involvement without surrendering U.S. control. He hasn't acknowledged that it's precisely the U.S. control that makes the occupation so objectionable to millions of Iraqis. Still, Bush has been compelled to internationalize certain functions that he had assumed the United States would perform, and for the reasons that Kerry predicted.


By the standard of previous presidential candidates running amid wartime quagmires, Kerry has been unusually forthcoming in his critique and prescriptions for Iraq. All Eisenhower pledged while seeking the office during the Korean conflict was, "I will go to Korea." In 1968 Nixon said that he had "a secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, by contrast, foresaw the perils of unilateralism and has consistently proposed a more workable occupation policy than Bush's. By its growing dependence on Brahimi and its increasingly plaintive calls for more nations to send troops, even the administration tacitly acknowledges that Kerry was right.


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[BayCityProgressive]

1. this would be great for Kerry to use.

[senseandsensibility]

2. I just sent Mr. Myerson

an e-mail thanking him for the great analysis. Thanks for the link. Please do the same, other DUers. And I agree that Kerry should use this. I also rated his article a 5 at ya-hoo! Finally,someone who isn't whining that Kerry doesn't have a plan for Iraq, but instead points out that he always has had, and that Bush will end up adopting it sooner or later, costing the U.S. much blood and treasure needlessly.