Did John Kerry really call for Obama to bomb Libyan bases?

[LeftyAndProud60]

I read this on huff-po, but it had to be wrong.

[dennis4868]

1. It's Obama's...

fault....at least that's the DU narrative.....

[vaberella]

2. Always. n/t

[ProSense]

3. This is how rumors start.

The Face The Nation segment didn't get much attention posted here.

Link to the video.

[vaberella]

4. HP has lied often. n/t

[Pirate Smile]

9. They excel at twisting things to make Democrats look bad. They do it mainly at President Obama

because, of course, he is the President but they will do it to any of the Dems if they can.

My fav is the blaring headline accusing a Dem of something horrible which you discover is actual not true if you go to the link. Classic Arianna.

[LeftyAndProud60]

5. he didn't say don't do it either. Just goes to show, he wouldn't have been much diff than W. nt

[Pirate Smile]

7. That is crazy. You are saying John Kerry would not have been much different from W?

This place just blows my mind sometimes (frequently).

[ProSense]

8. That makes no damn sense. n/t

[politicasista]

11. Facts never get in the way of Kerry/Obama bashing n/t

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

12. Precisely

[karynnj]

14. He would have been immensely different than Bush

He spoke of the conditions under which he thought the WORLD should respond - and it was IF AND ONLY IF Gadaffi was using his planes to massacre his people. This actually passes what he called a "global test" in 2004. If that condition were met, what he is proposing is to crater the air fields, making them unusable. This would ground - or mostly ground - the planes. I would guess that that could be done with drones or missiles.

What Kerry was suggesting would do two things:
-It would set a red line that would say that Gadaffi bombing huge numbers of his people was something that the world could not sit by and just verbally condemn.

- It would have military experts spend the time to determine the best way to do this - and the one he suggested (likely from military experts he spoke to) would create absolutely NO American footprint.


In January 2003, Kerry spoke of how Bush was rushing to war - when there were still diplomatic alternatives and the inspectors were doing their work. He importantly said that attacking now would make it war that was not entered as a last resort. To anyone with a Catholic (and I suspect a Christian) background, that phrase is from St Augustine's definition of a just war. In fact, in 2004, I suspected that "global test" was a secularization of the concept of just war. (Kerry gave a speech at Pepperdine on how his religion impacted his values and it is very clear that I was not wrong on that. http://www.pepperdine.edu/pr/releases/2006/september/kerry.htm )

[former9thward]

19. Gadaffi has been mainly using helicopter gunships.

"Cratering" the air fields would have no effect on those.

[BklnDem75]

18. With that reach, you'd be an incredible outfielder

[dionysus]

20. huh?

:shrug:

[phleshdef]

21. BS. The problem with Bush was NOT that he used military action.

The problem with Bush was that his administration pushed lies about another country in order to invade it, take it over and blow a trillion dollars finishing the job while simultaneously making private corporations that his VP was in bed with filthy rich off of it.

Many Presidents have used military action for good reasons and for bad reasons. Bush does not own the patent on it.

[On the Road]

6. Why? Establishing a No-Fly Zone Has a Lot of Support Across the Board

Everyone proposing that is pretty much calling for bombing the bases.

[karynnj]

15. Kerry is actually the one exception there - suggesting there are other

ways. The one he mentioned in brief was cratering the air strips.

This is actually NOT a new idea requiring new technology. Does anyone here remember the 1967 war between Israel and several Arab countries.

The first step was a surprise attack on the airstrips -

In three main waves of aerial attacks, and several smaller waves in the days following the operation, a total of 452 aircraft were destroyed, most of them on the ground. This left the IAF in almost complete control of the skies, and able to effectively assist the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ground units.

The operational success was achieved by concentrating on the initial destruction of the runways with a new rocket assisted bomb that would come to be known as the Durandal anti-runway warhead. As designed, after release of the bomb, a parachute is deployed to point the warhead directly toward the runway being attacked; at a set altitude, the rocket ignites and drives the warhead through the pavement of the runway before it detonates. The explosion creates a small crater over a large new sinkhole, meaning the damaged runway must be removed before the hole can be filled. Once the runways were disabled, entire air bases' complements of aircraft were effectively grounded and fell victim to subsequent attack waves, resulting in near-total Israeli air supremacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Focus

Note, that Kerry did NOT propose going back and destroying all the aircraft.

[NillaWafers]

10. No he did not. He called for bombing Libyan airport runways to stop the bombings of civilians.

He called for Obama to "crater" the runways so planes carrying bombs could not take off en route to bombing the hell out of the Libyan people.

[karynnj]

16. - even there he called for Obama to be prepared to do so IF Gadaffi

started to massacre his people using his planes to bomb them. (This is equivalent to someone removing an automatic rifle from the hands of a mass murder.)

It also was effective in the 6 day war in 1967. Nothing is ever without some risk of killing some people, but this seems less likely to do that than the drone warfare in Pakistan or almost anything else. Not to mention, under the conditions Kerry defined, it is very clear that it would, on balance, save lives - stopping a massacre.

[karynnj]

13. No he did not

The Huffington Post article is absurd - what Kerry called for is that the WORLD do the planning for a no fly zone that could be implemented IF Gadaffi started to massacre huge numbers of his people using airplanes.

He also suggested that this did not have to be done by patrolling - it could be done by cratering the airstrips - making them unusable.

"But Senator Kerry has a different view. "It's not a big air force . We are not talking about this gargantuan kind of force that we face. But more importantly, I would only consider it's implementation if Gadhafi himself were using it as a means of terror, as a means of massacring large numbers of civilians. And I think it is only then that the global community would say, 'Uh-oh, we've got to do something'," he said"

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/US-Senators-Push-for-a-Libya-No-Fly-Zone-117499793.html

Fortunately, Al Zazeera actually listened and reported it accurately. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/03/201136235322910617.html

If you question these two sources over the completely unedited, not fact checked Huffington Post, where the author had an agenda, here is the PRIMARY source available to everyone - the video of Face the Nation. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358612n&tag=contentMain

[Bluenorthwest]

17. Without a link this amounts to gossip, you know.

You read this somewhere on a huge website, might have read wrong, but you come to repeat it here. Without citing the article you are not quoting. Gossip has no value.

[karynnj]

23. Good point - and especially a site where there are diverse authors,

with little or no editing or fact checking.

From google, the author of this was a person, who hated John Kerry - but he hated Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, so Kerry should not feel left out. I responded to his idiotic, ill informed post - and he responded back. He ignored all I said of the Face the Nation interview, for which I supplied the link and any of links to quotes from the interview - he had none. His response - essentially that JK never said his vote was wrong on the IWR. (Absolutely untrue as he has many many times - so I googled and found he was a John Edwards advocate in 2008. I took the high road and simply mentioned the speech in 2005 when JK and gave a link to the Take back America speech in 2006 - so he could hear it himself - keeping that info to myself.)

I won't add the link because he deserves no more visibility than he got.

[TayTay]

22. No, he did not.

Easy answer to a short question.

Pleasure doing business with you.

[golfguru]

24. Sure...why not start a 3rd active war front

as if we don't have our hands full in Afghanistan & Iraq.