William Saletan's Take On Kerry's Postwar Speech

Kerry makes several good points. He criticizes President Bush for refusing to admit error or to ask sincerely for help or directions. He points out that we're paying other countries to give us the appearance of a coalition.

He asks who in the world will believe the next U.S. secretary of state who delivers a presentation on intelligence at the United Nations like the one Colin Powell delivered in February. While conceding that the United Nations' record of reconstructing countries isn't perfect, he points out that the United States' ability to do the job is worse.

Like other Democrats, Kerry sees no penalty in hyperbolic denunciations of Bush's Iraq policy. "This may be the most arrogant, deceptive moment in foreign policy in decades," he fumes. He calls postwar Iraq a potential "quagmire" and compares it to Vietnam. He describes our coalition of Mongolians and Estonians as "a cover-up" for unilateralism. Like curse words, these exaggerations are already beginning to lose their punch.

What Kerry can't get past, even as he shifts his focus to the postwar, is his vote to authorize the war. Today, he argues yet again that his vote meant no such thing.

When I voted to give the president the authority to use force, I said arms inspections are "absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world. That's how you make clear to the world we are contemplating war not for war's sake, but because it may be the ultimate weapons inspection enforcement mechanism." But the Bush administration, impatient to go into battle, stopped the clock on the inspectors … despite the call of many in Congress who had voted to authorize force as a last resort.

No matter how many times Kerry says this, it makes no sense. If you vote to authorize war as a weapons inspection enforcement mechanism, and the offender drags his heels and jerks around the inspectors, sooner or later you have to use the mechanism. An enforcement mechanism that's so ultimate and last-resort that you never resort it, even after 13 years, is no mechanism at all.

If Bush had given the inspectors another two or six months, and Iraq had continued to frustrate interviews with scientists and turn over no records of the destruction of previous weapons stockpiles, and France and Russia had continued to insist on more time, and Bush had decided to go in at that point, I have every confidence that we'd be hearing the same speech from Kerry today about how Bush "stopped the clock" and rushed to war. Unless, of course, the postwar had turned out not to be a threat to John Kerry's career.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2089071/

Does anyone agree at all with Saletan's take on weapons inspections? Would two or six months more have been wasted time? Is Kerry just suggesting that Bush rushed to war for political gain?

It's hard to comprehend that there are still hawks out there that are still willing to suggest that Bush did the right thing in March...

First he loved Dean. Hated Kerry. Hated Dean. Loved Kerry. Hates Kerry again.