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I am usually as very calm guy. But I am getting really upset.
For the Nth time: “IWR = Pro-War” is a wedge tactic invented by Kerry opponents. It is not the truth. Kerry vocally opposed war except as a last resort against imminent treat. It is totally infuriating that vicious remarks from Anti-War Dems regarding Kerry’s IWR vote continue apace, especially since Kerry, against all odd, without the big endorsements or the big money, took this issue to the voters of Iowa and won hands down.
Infuriating, also, because these remarks show so little consciousness of the
U.S. role in the region, so little guilt regarding complicity in the Iraqi
tragedy, the millions dead, the abominable poisons that fell on the enemies of
Saddam with U.S. acquiescence -- and for U.S. geopolitical goals. It is
infuriating that newly minted minions of a newly reborn peace-marcher can
see only black or white. They cannot understand that, as much as it was
atrociously criminal to do what the Bush did in 2003, it was just as evil to do
nothing but maintain people-punishing sanctions while the multi-decade reign of
atrocities of “our man in Bagdad” continued. There was a better way, and that
is what John Kerry, and the French and the Germans, and the Russians and the
Chinese, and the Canadians, and the Mexicans ….. voted for with UN 1441.
I repeat here my personal argument for why reasonable anti-war democrats should
accept Kerry’s vote.
John Kerry, had little choice in his IWR vote. A “no” vote would have been a
tactical coup to hold his anti-war base among Party activist. But, for reasons
of presidential politics, national policy, as well as concerns for precedent, a
“yes” vote on the Iraq War Resolution was the CORRECT VOTE for Kerry,
presidential candidate and Senior Senator on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.
Anti-war democrats should rally behind Kerry and accept his decision based on
his long record. Kerry is the guy who bucked the admirals of the navy and for 3 years camped on the bus, slept on the grass, marched the streets and confronted Senators, to stop an unjust war.
This is OUR John Kerry the “Tough Dove” – fiercely opposing the corrupt use of
American military force, but unflinching when he though force was absolutely
necessary. It is time for the Anti-War Dems to GET OVER the IWR vote, and get behind the ONLY democratic leader prepared to win the White House and lead the nation in these times.
Presidential Politics
Since Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan over the Iran Hostages, Dovishness has
spelled doom in national political campaigns. Clinton chose Gore over Kerry
as his 1992 running mate, reportedly because Kerry had opposed the first Gulf
War while Gore had joined the Republicans to support it. Clinton had to
compensate for his weak-on-defense image.
Curiously enough, Kerry opposed the Gulf war because he saw U.S. militarization
of the region as a potential long-term disaster. Kerry had led the
investigation of the Reagan/Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld duplicitous involvement in the
Iran-Iraq War during the 80's and saw that the Gulf conflict was not just
avoidable, but a war that should be avoided.
Al Gore, supported by a few conservative democrats such as Governor Dean,
voted for that War: a war that desecrated the Muslim Holy Lands, turned the
formerly pro-U.S. Islamic radicals into Anti-American Jihadist and led more
than a decade of death and tragedy for people in the region. But that vote for
war qualified him to be Vice President of the United States.
In 2000, once again, John Kerry was on the V.P. shortlist, but Gore picked the
hawkish Joe “the unimpeachable” Lieberman.
So, no doubt Senator John “twice burned” Kerry, now a presidential candidate,
Could have been reluctant to play the dove on the IWR in the face of a purported threat of
“mass destruction” from Saddam ‘the devil” Hussein. Kerry, the Senator, could
have voted NO to register his distrust of Bush regime intentions. Kerry, the
Presidential Candidate, had to give deference to the word of the sitting
President and consider Democratic vulnerabilities in ’04. He had to vote “YES.”
Policy
For more than a decade Kerry had broken with liberal non-interventionism and
argued for a proactive U.S. foreign policy to address world humanitarian
crises, WMD proliferation, and global terrorism. In his book, “The New War,”
(1997), Kerry pulls together insights from 3 terms on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and a decade as Chairman or Ranking Member of the Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations. He argued
forcefully for a realignment of U.S. military and intelligence posture to
defend against new threats to U.S. global interests and national infrastructure
and called for urgent preemptive executive action, warning: "It will take
only one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change
the world in a single day."
On the campaign trail Kerry stated the policy position that led to his
difficult IWR vote:
"Americans deserve better than a false choice between force without
diplomacy and diplomacy without force. We need to take the third path in
foreign policy – not a hard unilateralism or a soft isolationism – but a bold,
progressive internationalism – backed by undoubted military might – that
commits America to lead in the cause of human liberty and prosperity.
If Democrats do not stand for making America safer, stronger, and more secure,
we won't win back the White House – and we won't deserve to."
-- John Kerry, December 16, 2003
Precedent
John Kerry led the anti-Vietnam war movement not as a pacifist, but as a war
hero who, after 6 years in combat, came to question the morality of U.S.
military tactics and the justice of American policy for the region. Since
Vietnam, Kerry has supported the principled use of force and has backed U.S.
military ventures, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Somalia and Haiti. In Bosnia,
Kerry supported covert action to oppose “ethnic cleansing.” In Kosovo, he went
further than the Clinton administration, arguing (on the side of NATO Supreme
Commander, Wesley Clark, incidentally) that ground troops should remain as an
option for stopping former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's violent
crackdown on the Serbian province's ethnic Albanian majority.
Precedent regarding Saddam Hussein could not be clearer. While, Kerry opposed
the main resolution authorizing force in the Persian Gulf in 1991, he has since
criticized both former President Clinton and his successor, President Bush, for
missed opportunities to return inspectors to Iraq to end the risk of Iraqi WMD
proliferation.
In 1998 Kerry joined John McCain to argue for forceful and effective action, covert
or otherwise, to enforce U.N. inspections or remove the Saddam regime. In a
Feb. 23, 1998 press release on the Iraq dilemma Kerry stated:
“This is the first issue of proliferation in the post Cold War period. It is
imperative for us as a nation to stand our ground and for the Western world to
make it clear that we cannot allow by any nation to possess and use those kinds
of weapons.”
Given this precedent, a vote against Bush’s September, 2002, Iraq War
Resolution, in this post-9/11 national security environment, would have exposed
Kerry to a charge of enormous hypocrisy and partisan demagoguery.
In voting “yes” on the IWR Kerry said he had to trust the President of the
United States when he said that war would be “a last resort”. At the time of
the vote, in a substantial, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor, Kerry said
he would strongly opposed any unilateral movement to war and that he did not
believe that Saddam’s threat was yet imminent. He kept is word and led
opposition to unilateral action during the U.N. debates, Bush’s “rush to war,”
and the administration’s duplicitous and inept foreign policy.
Conclusion
John Kerry has been handed the lot of a fighter for most of his adult life.
With his vote for the IWR, Kerry risked his presumptive right to lead a campaign
for which he as prepared for a lifetime -- a campaign to overthrow the Bush
regime.
At the same time, John Kerry knows that that same vote is part of a necessary
armor against the republican onslaught, should he, against all odds, end up as
the standard-bearer for the Party in the ’04 election.
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