President Bush's rationale for war in Iraq continues to crumble, but it seems that Sen. John F. Kerry has his own war problem.
While the effort to tar Kerry's Vietnam record has not been a positive development for the Democrat, it has obscured media coverage over a more current subject -- Kerry's position on the conflict in Iraq.
In case you missed it, Bush forced Kerry into a corner earlier this month by demanding he answer a simple yes-or-no question: "Knowing what we know now [would Kerry] have supported going into Iraq?"
If Kerry answered no, then the Bush campaign would take the sound bite and make the argument that Saddam Hussein would still be in power if Kerry had been president. If Kerry answered yes, they would argue that his position was essentially the same as Bush's position and that his criticism of the president's Iraq policy was hypocritical.
Kerry -- who insinuated at the Democratic convention that Bush had misled the nation into war -- said that he "would have voted for" the resolution that permitted the possibility of going to war in Iraq even given what we know now. But he added that as president, he would have "used that authority to do things very differently."
For Kerry, it all hinges on the word "authority." Kerry believes that Bush needed explicit congressional authority "to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for the agreements that Saddam Hussein made with the world, which were the only things that kept him in power after the Gulf War," said David Wade, a spokesman for Kerry's campaign.
In Kerry's convention speech in Boston last month, and more pointedly in interviews following the speech, he criticized Bush for using faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the war and suggested that the president knew better than to make strong links between al Qaeda and Iraq. And now, even knowing all that, Kerry says he would still have voted for the resolution.
But weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda were the predominant justifications in the resolution giving the president the authority to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." [Full Text of the Resolution]
The following are the only non-WMD, non-al Qaeda justifications cited in the resolution authorizing use of force:
• Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
• The current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;
• Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
• It is in the national security interests of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region.
So it seems that Kerry believes that Hussein's refusal to admit U.N. weapons inspectors, Hussein's attack on U.S. planes in Operation Southern Watch, and his 1993 attempt to assassinate the first President Bush are reasons enough for using U.S. forces to remove Hussein from power.
