Via Josh Marshall, I suggest you check out
this journalist who - can you believe it - actually took the time to go back and look at over 200 Kerry speeches on Iraq since 2002 (scroll down two stories on Josh's website). The surprise?: Kerry has actually held a very consistent position, as I have maintained for a while.
Here is Kerry's position in a simple, bullet form:
- Kerry voted to authorized President Bush the OPTION of using force as a means of strengthening the president's hand in his negotiations with the UN and Iraq more specifically.
- Kerry than spoke out against various things he felt President Bush did wrong in the run up to the war and after the war was in fact launched.
- In 2003, when President Bush asked Congress to approve an additional $87 billion in Iraq War funding, John Kerry voted agains the bill in its final form. Why?
- Did he indeed "vote for it before voting against it?" Well, yes. He voted for a preliminary version of the bill that would have required the $87 billion to be funded from a partial repeal of Bush's tax cuts, based on the crazy notion that a nation at war needs to share the sacrifice.
- When Bush and Congressional Republicans balked on this proposal, Kerry voted against the final version because he did not want to write the President what amounted to essentially a bad check (ie a check not covered by requisite funds), especially with the knowledge that Kerry had acquired by that time about the reckless and incompetent way the Bush administration was handling the war.
- Since the bill had enough votes to pass without Kerry's vote (and thus his vote would not have the effect of depriving troops of key supplies), he decided to vote against the final bill as a way of sending the president a message that poor policy decisions should not be rewarded with unlimited funding.
- John Edwards voted against the $87 billion for a similar reason.
- Ever since then, Kerry has maintained a very critical stance towards Bush's handling of the Iraq War, but he has never advocated a "cut and run" solution.
- Instead, he has laid out a plan that will enable the United States to withdraw all of its troops within four years, after a stable and (hopefully) democratic Iraq has been assured.
- Kerry has never contradicted himself.
- In front of the Grand Canyon, he said he would have voted to authorize the President to use force if he had it to do again because he still feels that the President needed that "stick" as important leveraging device.
- On the Don Imus show, and in several recent speeches, Kerry he has said he would not have gone to war in Iraq having known what he knows today at the time - i.e. no WMD, no Al Qaeda connection, facts verified by the CIA and the 9/11 commission.
This was, is, and has been Kerry's Iraq War position. Pass it on.