Quagmire! John Kerry's many positions on Iraq

From The Kerry Spot: NUANCED? OR JUST PLAN NONSENSE?

It's easy to get mired in the daily back-and-forth of the campaign and to lose sight of the big picture: How a potential president would handle the life-and-death issues of war and peace.

Perhaps this is the right time to closely reexamine Kerry's plans for Iraq, based on his recent statement that he would have gone to war in Iraq, even if he had known there were no WMDs and no direct ties between Iraq and 9/11 (notice the distinction between ties to 9/11 and ties to al Qaeda).

Specifically, Kerry was asked whether he would support the war "knowing what we know now" about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that U.S. and British officials were certain were there. In response, Kerry said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."

A mind of insufficient sophistication might conclude that this comment renders moot Kerry's insistence that "We were misled about weapons of mass destruction," as he said in March. Or his charge that "we were misled in very specific terms about the evidence that we were showed within those briefings to the Congress of the United States" might appear, at first glance, to be rendered irrelevant if a President Kerry would have made the same choice. But this is not the case.

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Kerry's incoherent, sort-of-for, sort-of-against, shapeless gray blobs of linguistic ooze make debating his views impossible, because there's nothing to support or to dispute. Kerry never comes out and clearly and consistently advocates one position that the voters can either endorse or reject. As the public mood shifts, so does he. And he always leaves the wiggle room, the subordinate clause with caveats that nullifies the original statement.

It's enough to make a guy miss Howard Dean.

While we obviously heartily concur -- Kerry has a position for every constituency -- he has been consistent -- consistently wrong -- on two matters. First, the insipid claim that there was a "rush" to war when 15 months passed between Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech and the start of the war. In fact, we have always believed this "rush" was a mistake, that action should have been taken much sooner and that this "rush" allowed Saddam to organize the insurgents -- including importing terrorists from Syria and Iran -- and perhaps spirit his WMD out of the country.

Second, is the silly notion that the diplomatic route was eschewed -- it wasn't, as evidenced by months wasted at the UN trying to get the corrupt and failed former powers of Old Europe on board. How much diplomacy is enough? Kerry never really says, and the Commander in Chief doesn't have the luxury of waiting forever for countries swimming in Oil-for-Food kickbacks to rally to our cause.

As evidenced by their failure to act in the Balkans and now in Sudan, relying on these countries to do what is right can result in thousands displaced and dead.