Exclusive Kennedy Memoir Excerpt: 'No Just Cause' For Iraq War
Ben Frumin | September 14, 2009, 11:06AM
We've obtained an exclusive excerpt from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's autobiography "True Compass" -- which goes on sale today -- in which the Massachusetts Democrat blasts the Bush administration's selling and execution of the Iraq War.
Kennedy wrote that "America's people deserved better than the misuse of power in Iraq" and described the run-up to war as a "march to disaster" in which "the administration's justifications departed from reality."
"The president and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill," Kennedy wrote, adding that "there was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq.
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All of America's people deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power in Iraq.
As did the Iraqi people. The war's effects are still fresh as I write these words, and so I will attempt no detailed retelling of them here. Looking over my personal journals and the many speeches and briefing memos in my files, I am struck once again at how clear the march to disaster seemed to me at the time, and how brazenly the administration's justifications departed from reality.
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There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.
As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing."Full excerpt available:
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/exclusive-kennedy-memoir-excerpt-no-just-cause-for-iraq-war.php?ref=fpblg
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