Kerry Occupying Iraq

[A vote for Kerry is a vote for Kerry.  This is what a voter mandate will
authorizing him to do, should he and Edwards win.  These two fellas don't
care who or what you're voting "against".]

POLITICS AND POLICY
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SB108994509460465669.htm
Kerry Sets Test for Iraq Withdrawal

Candidate Seems Unlikely
To Commit to Terminating
Presence of U.S. Troops

By JOHN HARWOOD and JACOB M. SCHLESINGER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 16, 2004; Page A5

CHARLESTON, W. Va. -- John Kerry set a three-part test
for removing U.S. troops from Iraq if he is elected
president, while warning that President Bush might
commence a more rapid draw-down this fall to improve
his re-election prospects.

The three conditions, Mr. Kerry said in an interview
with The Wall Street Journal, are "to measure the
level of stability" in Iraq, "to measure the outlook
for the stability to hold" and "to measure the ability
... of their security forces" to defend Iraq. Until
each condition is satisfied, he added, "I will provide
for the world's need not to have a failed state in
Iraq." (See excerpts from the interview.)

Mr. Kerry's remarks, two weeks before he accepts the
nomination of a Democratic Party with deep misgivings
about the war, indicate the Massachusetts senator
isn't preparing to spell out a timetable for rapid
withdrawal of the roughly 140,000 U.S. troops now in
Iraq. To the contrary, he suggested that Mr. Bush was
more likely to do so, saying "I've heard [it] said by
many people" that the White House might be gearing up
to withdraw troops before the November election.

"I'm prepared for any political move" on Iraq, Mr.
Kerry said. "I'd put nothing past them."

White House spokeswoman Suzy DeFrancis promptly
dismissed that possibility. "The troop levels in Iraq
have always been guided by what commanders in the
field have said is necessary to accomplish the
mission," she said. "No other factor would enter into
it."

Looking weary from the campaign sprint since he named
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as his running mate
last week, Mr. Kerry said he doesn't contemplate "an
open-ended commitment" of U.S. troops. But nor would
he pledge to end the U.S. presence in Iraq, even by
the end of his first term.

"At the end of my first term I would consider it a
failure of my diplomacy if we haven't reduced the
number significantly," Mr. Kerry said. But "I
certainly can't tell you numbers. ... The key at this
point is to have a stable, nonfailed state that is
moving toward democracy and has security sufficient
for the government to stand on its own."

Kerry senior foreign-policy adviser James P. Rubin
said the three-part test the candidate articulated was
more specific than his previous admonitions that
American troops couldn't leave until Iraq had become
more stable and secure. Mr. Rubin noted that some
portion of the U.S. troop deployment might be able to
return home as Iraq moves closer to meeting Mr.
Kerry's conditions. But Mr. Kerry declined to spell
out the benchmarks that he would use to measure
conditions in Iraq, or specify any incremental troop
reductions along the way.

"I have a plan for how we can get there" by enlisting
greater international support, Mr. Kerry said aboard
his campaign plane. "I'm not going to negotiate my
plan in the newspapers. But I will get there in ways
that this president can't because he has burned the
bridges of credibility and burned the alliances. They
need to be re-established with ... a new president."

The issue of Iraq has posed a challenge for Mr. Kerry
throughout his campaign. In the fall of 2002 he voted
with a Senate majority to give President Bush
authority to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein.
Later, as war opponent Howard Dean shot to the front
of the Democratic nomination race, Mr. Kerry was
thrown on the defensive and criticized Mr. Bush for
misusing the authority he obtained to use force. Late
last year Mr. Kerry voted against legislation to
satisfy the president's request for an additional $87
billion in war-related spending -- a vote that Mr.
Bush and his campaign have harshly criticized in
recent days.

But as he prepares for a convention that his campaign
wants to use to introduce him more fully to the
American public, Mr. Kerry is determined to present
himself as a leader of strength, one who would more
effectively pursue the same goals Mr. Bush has
established for progress in Iraq and the broader
anti-terror war. Instead of acting promptly to reduce
troop strength, he said he would consult with military
commanders to determine how many more troops might be
needed in the near term to safeguard Iraq.

"I know how to do that," said Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam
veteran who has previously accused the president of
insufficiently taking the needs of U.S. troops into
account. "I think I'll do that more effectively than
this president, and I'll ... listen to them with
greater respect than this president and this secretary
of defense did."

Derided by the Bush team as a flip-flopping
legislator, he made the same charge about shifts in
the president's position following the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction, among other setbacks.

"I don't trust this administration's definition of
where they're going or what they're going to do," he
said. "They've already shifted everything. They
shifted the reason for the war. They're capable of
shifting anything."

---

[The reason they won't put the Kucinich antiwar language into the
Democratic platform (a non-binding and worthless jesture) is because they
were wrong just like Mr. Bush was.]

LA Times, July 13, 2004
EDITORIAL
Kerry-Edwards Stonewall
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-kerry13jul13,1,6259345.story

If not murder, John F. Kerry and John Edwards have accused President
Bush of something close to criminally negligent homicide in Iraq. "They
were wrong and soldiers died because they were wrong," Kerry said of the
Bush administration over the weekend.

This is strong language, but not unjustified. Last week's Senate
Intelligence Committee report adds to the pile of studies and reportage
that has undermined the key reasons Bush gave for going to war: Saddam
Hussein's imperial designs, links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, weapons of
mass destruction and so on.

The trouble is, both Sens. Kerry and Edwards voted yes on the resolution
authorizing the war in Iraq. And now they refuse to say whether they
would have supported the resolution if they had known what they know
today. Both say they can't be bothered with "hypothetical questions."

But whether it is a hypothetical question depends on how you phrase it.
Do they regret these votes? Were their votes a mistake? These are not
hypothetical questions. And they are questions the Democratic candidates
for president and vice president cannot duck if they wish to attack Bush
on Iraq in such morally charged language.

After all, the issue raised by the Senate Intelligence Committee report
is not whether the Bush administration bungled the prosecution of the
war, or whether there should have been greater international
cooperation, or whether the challenges of occupying and rebuilding the
country were grossly underestimated. When Kerry says "they were wrong,"
he is referring to the administration's basic case for going to war.
Kerry supported that decision. So did Edwards. Were they wrong? If they
won't answer that question, they have no moral standing to criticize Bush.

Reluctance to answer the question is understandable. If they say they
stand by their pro-war votes, this makes nonsense of their criticisms of
Bush. If they say they were misled or duped by the administration, they
look dopey and weak. Many of their Democratic Senate colleagues were
skeptical of the administration's evidence even at the time. If Kerry
and Edwards tell the probable truth -- that they were deeply dubious
about the war but afraid to vote no in the post-9/11 atmosphere and be
tarred as lily-livered liberals -- they would win raves from editorial
writers for their frankness and courage. And they could stop dreaming of
oval offices.

Kerry and Edwards are in a bind. But it is a bind of their own making.
The great pity will be if this bind leads the Democratic candidates to
back off from their harsh, and largely justified, criticism of Bush. The
Democrats could lose a valuable issue, and possibly even the election,
because the Democratic candidates were too clever for their own good.

In the past, Kerry has dodged the question of his pro-war vote by saying
that he intended to give Bush negotiating leverage and to encourage
multilateral action, not to endorse a unilateral American invasion of
Iraq. Unfortunately, what he may have intended is not what he voted for.
Furthermore, a vote in favor of the war resolution was unavoidably a
statement that the various complaints against Hussein did justify going
to war against him, if all else failed, whatever caveats and escape
hatches were in any individual senator's head.

Kerry and Edwards would like to fudge the issue by conflating it with
questions about how the war was prosecuted. Or they say that what
matters is where we go from here. It is true that "what now?" is the
important policy question. But that doesn't make it the only question.
How we got here affects how we get out. And even if it had no practical
relevance to our future Iraq policy, hearing how Kerry and Edwards
explain their votes to authorize a war they now regard as disastrous
would be helpful in assessing their character and judgment.

Their continued refusal to explain would be even more helpful,
unfortunately.
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