I did not like the way he tried to hurt Obama's campaign by using the word Muslim in the way he did. We can pretend he meant nothing at all, or we can recognize it for the veiled attack it was probably meant to be.
So let's look back at May of this year when Bob Kerrey finally got sick and tired of those of us on the left who have opposed this war. He composed an op ed for the Wall Street Journal to put us in our place, and to let us know that he did after all believe that Iraq was "rightly seen as a threat following 9/11."
Fair is fair, right? Right.
I think any Democrat who still in the year 2007 thinks Iraq was more dangerous because of 9/11 needs some scrutiny.
The Left's Iraq MuddleSee, even the title of his op ed is offensive to those of us on the left who opposed the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.
At this year's graduation celebration at The New School in New York, Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause.
But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: "Democracy cannot be imposed with military force."
What troubled me about this statement--a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq--is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently
Did you get that? He thinks we should be using our country's arms to impose Democracy. He is proud of it.
Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were "over there." It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the "head of the snake." But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.
He really has a fear of "radical islam", which makes me even more sure of his intentions in using the word so much in connection with Obama.
This is a long column, and you really should read all of it. It continues along the line of this next paragraph, which I find appalling.
No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq
He just keeps repeating that Iraq was a bigger danger after 9/11. That is so misleading. He is trying to justify our invasion of a country that was not an immediate threat by connecting it to 9/11.
This one paragraph from his endorsement of Hillary is bothersome.
Referring to Obama, from the WP:
Kerrey continued, "It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal." He added, "He's got a whale of a lot more intellectual talent than I've got as well."
Kerrey goes for ClintonAt least Barack Hussein Obama doesn't think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.
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