The more I think about John Kerry’s speech on Iraq policy, the more I love it. Everything about it was on target — it was a sober assessment of the disastrous Bush policy, it held the president responsible without blaming the military or undercutting the troops, it looked ahead to what he could do better and more effectively, and it left no ambiguities. No one can reasonably say they don’t know what Kerry thinks of Iraq, the war, or Bush’s approach; he laid it all on the line.
But one of the best things about Kerry’s new forceful approach to holding Bush accountable for the debacle is that the Bush campaign clearly doesn’t know what to do about it.
For example, Bush and his aides simultaneously argued that Kerry’s approach was the same as the president’s while also insisting that Kerry is completely wrong.
Although Bush said Kerry’s Iraq proposals mirrored his own, his campaign put out a strongly worded — and contradictory — statement. “John Kerry’s latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror,” said spokesman Steve Schmidt.
Well, which is it? Are Kerry’s proposals in line with Bush’s goals, or are they a strategy for defeat? We’ll have to wait for Karl Rove to sort all this out for us. I’m sure he’ll think of something.
Moreover, Kerry was clear about how things would have been different were he president in 2002 and 2003 instead of Bush.
“President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is no — because a Commander-in-Chief’s first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe.”
Bush responded to this by insisting that Kerry is flip-flopping because Kerry “just last month [said] he still would have voted for force even knowing everything we know today.” But that’s not even close to being true. Kerry didn’t “vote for force”; he voted to give Bush authority to pursue diplomacy at the United Nations. It’s not Kerry’s fault Bush screwed everything up by misusing that authority.
Indeed, as Slate’s William Saletan explained last month, Kerry has been consistent all along — Kerry, in light of all that we now know, could not back the war in Iraq.
Does Kerry now agree with Bush’s decision? Would Kerry have gone into Iraq? Would he have voted to give Bush the authorization had Kerry known what he now knows about the absence of WMD and about how Bush would use the authorization?
The answer, if you look closely at Kerry’s statements over the past three years, is no.
To be sure, facts and reality have generally played no role in Bush’s campaign rhetoric, so it’s little surprise that the president’s reaction to Kerry’s devastating speech doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yet, the fact that Kerry appears to have put Bush on the defensive, while pushing the media to seriously consider the failures of the last two years, proves that yesterday’s speech clearly did exactly what it set out to do.