John Kerry, Bush's Advisor On Iraq

Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) has been all over the map on the topic of the Iraq War. In October 2002, he voted for the Iraq war resolution. Later, assaulted from his left on the campaign trail, he changed his mind, stating that the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq.

When confronted with his vote in favor of the war, Kerry has flip-flopped back, retreating to this position, which he gave this month to a reporter from Time: "I might have gone to war but not the way the President did."

Is that so? It sounds reasonable enough. But in fact we don’t have to rely on any such guesswork: we have a way of knowing exactly what Kerry would have done, had he been president.

On September 6, 2002, Kerry laid out a very specific plan for dealing with Iraq in an op-ed in the New York Times. And looking back now at that op-ed, it almost appears that Bush took his advice, step by step, through the entire process.

It is not unfair to hold Kerry to what he said, especially considering his comments to Time Magazine this month: “I refuse ever to accept the notion that anything I've suggested with respect to Iraq was nuanced. It was clear. It was precise. It was, in fact, prescient. It was ahead of the curve about what the difficulties were. And that is precisely what a President is supposed to be. I think I was right, 100% correct, about how you should have done Iraq.”

So what did Kerry suggest? On September 6, 2002, he wrote: "For the sake of our country, the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq, the administration must seek advice and approval from Congress, laying out the evidence and making the case."

This the administration did, and it received the support of Kerry and most others in Congress.

"Then," Kerry continued, "in concert with our allies, [the administration] must seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement from the United Nations Security Council."

Again, exactly what Bush did in November 2002 by bringing resolution 1441 to the Security Council, giving Iraq a full four months to disarm completely and give inspectors proof thereof. The resolution passed unanimously.

Kerry's advice continued: "We should at the same time offer a clear ultimatum to Iraq before the world: Accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise. Some in the administration actually seem to fear that such an ultimatum might frighten Saddam Hussein into cooperating."

This ultimatum was given, and at first Saddam appeared to blink. UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix and his team returned to Iraq.

But they did not receive cooperation "without negotiation or compromise." To the contrary, as The New York Times reported on January 31, 2003: "Mr. Blix reiterated his report's key finding that Iraq had not provided anything like the wholehearted cooperation he needed to certify that Saddam Hussein was not concealing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. His concern about Iraq's attitude, he said, led him to refrain from explicitly asking for more time for inspections when he reported to the Security Council on Monday."

Even Blix, no fan of the war, knew at that point that the inspection process had failed, in spite of Hussein's public destruction of a few missiles he supposedly never had to begin with. In the following weeks, Hussein even made new demands of the UN--in other words, "negotiation and compromise," anathema to the Kerry plan.

But Kerry had foreseen this possiblity as well: "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act."

And would you know it, that's exactly how things unfolded. Before any vote had been taken, unilateralist John Kerry had already endorsed everything Bush ended up doing, from start to finish.

Nor can Kerry claim he was fooled by sexed-up intelligence from the Bush administration about WMD. He is on the record talking about Iraq's WMD threat in 1998, when he said, simply, "Saddam Hussein is pursuing a program to build weapons of mass destruction." As early as 1990, he stated in the Senate that "Iraq has developed a chemical weapons capability, and is pursuing a nuclear weapons development program."

One might believe that the Iraq War was a bad idea. Still, John Kerry is definitely in no position to criticize anyone for anything--he could practically be the author and architect of the Bush plan.

His constantly shifting position since then, though enigmatic to some, is easily explained in three words: transparent political opportunism.

I'm posting the whole thing here, so I can bookmark it for fast access.

We Still Have a Choice on Iraq
By JOHN F. KERRY, The New York Times Op-Ed, September 6, 2002

WASHINGTON — It may well be that the United States will go to war with Iraq. But if so, it should be because we have to — not because we want to. For the American people to accept the legitimacy of this conflict and give their consent to it, the Bush administration must first present detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and then prove that all other avenues of protecting our nation's security interests have been exhausted. Exhaustion of remedies is critical to winning the consent of a civilized people in the decision to go to war. And consent, as we have learned before, is essential to carrying out the mission. President Bush's overdue statement this week that he would consult Congress is a beginning, but the administration's strategy remains adrift.

Regime change in Iraq is a worthy goal. But regime change by itself is not a justification for going to war. Absent a Qaeda connection, overthrowing Saddam Hussein — the ultimate weapons-inspection enforcement mechanism — should be the last step, not the first. Those who think that the inspection process is merely a waste of time should be reminded that legitimacy in the conduct of war, among our people and our allies, is not a waste, but an essential foundation of success.

If we are to put American lives at risk in a foreign war, President Bush must be able to say to this nation that we had no choice, that this was the only way we could eliminate a threat we could not afford to tolerate.

In the end there may be no choice. But so far, rather than making the case for the legitimacy of an Iraq war, the administration has complicated its own case and compromised America's credibility by casting about in an unfocused, overly public internal debate in the search for a rationale for war. By beginning its public discourse with talk of invasion and regime change, the administration has diminished its most legitimate justification of war — that in the post-Sept. 11 world, the unrestrained threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein is unacceptable and that his refusal to allow in inspectors is in blatant violation of the United Nations 1991 cease-fire agreement that left him in power.

The administration's hasty war talk makes it much more difficult to manage our relations with other Arab governments, let alone the Arab street. It has made it possible for other Arab regimes to shift their focus to the implications of war for themselves rather than keep the focus where it belongs — on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his deadly arsenal. Indeed, the administration seems to have elevated Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his neighbors to a level he would never have achieved on his own.

There is, of course, no question about our capacity to win militarily, and perhaps to win easily. There is also no question that Saddam Hussein continues to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and his success can threaten both our interests in the region and our security at home. But knowing ahead of time that our military intervention will remove him from power, and that we will then inherit all or much of the burden for building a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, is all the more reason to insist on a process that invites support from the region and from our allies. We will need that support for the far tougher mission of ensuring a future democratic government after the war.

The question is not whether we should care if Saddam Hussein remains openly scornful of international standards of behavior that he agreed to live up to. The question is how we secure our rights with respect to that agreement and the legitimacy it establishes for the actions we may have to take. We are at a strange moment in history when an American administration has to be persuaded of the virtue of utilizing the procedures of international law and community — institutions American presidents from across the ideological spectrum have insisted on as essential to global security.

For the sake of our country, the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq, the administration must seek advice and approval from Congress, laying out the evidence and making the case. Then, in concert with our allies, it must seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement from the United Nations Security Council. We should at the same time offer a clear ultimatum to Iraq before the world: Accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise. Some in the administration actually seem to fear that such an ultimatum might frighten Saddam Hussein into cooperating. If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act. But until we have properly laid the groundwork and proved to our fellow citizens and our allies that we really have no other choice, we are not yet at the moment of unilateral decision-making in going to war against Iraq.

John F. Kerry, a Democrat, is a senator from Massachusetts

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