John Kerry Attacks Bush Over Iraq Policies

In a speech Thursday in Los Angeles, the former (and perhaps future) Democratic Party presidential candidate warned that the mistakes of Iraq must not be repeated in the current standoff with Iran.

“War is the ultimate failure of diplomacy,” Kerry told a gathering of the Pacific Council on International Policy. “Yet our current leadership has arrogantly discarded this basic principle…. All too often they disdained diplomacy as little more than an inconvenient detour on the chosen path to armed conflict.”

The result, he said, was an ill-advised rush to war in Iraq that alienated other governments and diminished sympathy for the U.S. generated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. America’s current isolation, and the presence of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, is “playing right into Iranian hands…. The Iranians are delighted,” Kerry said.