Kerry's Position on Iraq

In the first presidential debate last week, Senator Kerry tried to clearly define his "consistent" position on Iraq, in the face of the Bush campaign's relentless effort to pin the "flip-flop" tag on him. His statement of position:

I know exactly what we need to do in Iraq, and my position has been consistent: Saddam Hussein is a threat. He needed to be disarmed. We needed to go to the U.N. The president needed the authority to use force in order to be able to get him to do something, because he never did it without the threat of force. But we didn't need to rush to war without a plan to win the peace.

What does this statement mean? George Will translates it, "Make me president and I will more deftly implement essentially the same policy." This is why Kerry has had such a hard time distinguishing himself from the president on the issue he has chosen to fight this campaign on. He says, essentially, Bush's ideas could have been implemented better. That's not exactly a strong case to be president.

In what way does Kerry say he would have been better? According to his comments in the debate, he would distinguish himself in essentially two ways. First, he would have better planned for the post-war occupation and rebuilding of Iraq. Second, he would have more enthusiastically enlisted the help of the United Nations, perhaps through another round of UN resolutions.

The basic problem here is the initial premise, namely "Saddam Hussein [was] a threat." If one accepts this assumption, then Bush's actions, frankly, follow logically. If, after 12 years of economic and political sanctions by the United Nations, Saddam Hussein was still a threat to his neighbors, and ultimately to the US, then quite clearly the sanctions regime sponsored by the UN had failed. These sanctions were designed and implemented with the goal of disarming Hussein. If he still had vast stockpiles of weapons, as the president argued, then it is quite obvious these sanctions had failed. Furthermore, such stockpiles would indicate that Hussein was actively deceiving the United Nations with this repeated protestations of innocence. Such deception would have to give one pause. No, if Hussein really was a threat, as Kerry and Bush both contend, then something had to be done to eliminate Hussein. War? Maybe. But certainly something.

To argue for another round of sanctions, as Kerry did in the debate, is plain silly. There were already numerous sanctions and UN resolutions in place addressing the fundamental point, resolutions being ignored by Hussein if he really was a threat. What's the point of adding another one? Does a parent just continually tell a child to do something, and when the child continues to disobey, simply issue another demand? No. At some point, the parent in some way compels the child to comply. The same is true here. If Hussein was continually disregarding the demands of the global community, then at some point the global community must stop demanding obedience and start compelling it.

Logically, one cannot argue that, on the one hand, Hussein was a threat, and on the other hand that more sanctions or resolutions are required. This viewpoint is, to quote the president, "ludicrous."

But the issue is this: Saddam Hussein was not a threat in 2003! The absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proves this simple fact. Hussein was not a threat, the inspections, sanctions, and UN resolutions in fact had their desired effect. During the debate, the president repeatedly asserted that Hussein needed to be disarmed. HE WAS! The reason the war was a mistake is that the stated goal of the war not only could have been achieved through non-military measures, but it had been achieved before the war even started.

That Senator Kerry, after all that has emerged since the war began, still cannot see this simple fact is quite disturbing. How can I vote for a candidate whose only argument is that he would have done a better job implementing a policy that should never have been pursued to begin with? Who does one vote for, the one who came up with a bad policy and then carried it out badly, or the one who promises to do a better job implementing the same bad policy?

Having been so critical of both the president and Senator Kerry, it is only fair to lay out what should have been done. Intelligence estimates suggest that Saddam Hussein, an enemy of the United States, has stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and has made progress in nuclear weapons programs. Armed with this information, the president should have gone to the United Nations, as he ultimately did, to persuade the Security Council to issue one last demand that weapons inspectors be allowed to resume their jobs. These inspectors, armed with detailed intelligence supplied by the United States, could investigate the exact locations where stockpiles are allegedly being stored. There are only two possible scenarios from this point: (a) the inspectors confirm the intelligence information by finding the stockpiles, or (b) the inspectors find nothing. In the first case, the president could have then argued strongly that Hussein must be dealt with, and the world would likely have supported him as they did his father in 1991. History shows that the second scenario is what played out. The inspectors found nothing. At some point, the absence of any supporting evidence on the ground should force the president to re-evaluate the intelligence data he has been given. Realizing the errors in the intelligence, the president backs off on military action against Hussein, and continues the clandestine efforts to remove him from power.