The Debate Into Iraq
You want to keep the peace, you’ve got to have the authorization to use force. But it’s — this will be — this is a chance for Congress to indicate support. It’s a chance for Congress to say, we support the administration’s ability to keep the peace. AND
Our goal is not merely to limit Iraq’s violations of Security Council resolutions, or to slow down its weapons program. Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully.
Bush said those things. Kerry’s caveat-filled comments, in defense of his “yea” vote, echo that reasoning (I’d have to pull it from his Senate website, and I don’t feel like it right now). Kerry’s position, therein, giving Bush a big stick to use to force Saddam to comply is intellectually defensible. Except that… well… I don’t believe Bush (I didn’t believe Bush at the time) and I don’t believe Kerry.
Ted Rall puts the general problem here. Political calculations are us. I think that a “no” vote would put Kerry in a more tenuable position electorally right now, even if a “yea” is intellectually defensible, but it didn’t look that way to Kerry at the time. (As it stands, every response from the Bush Administration to any criticism made by Kerry about Iraq is He voted for the war resolution.) There’s a weird trick to understanding swing voters, which has to do with “gutso” more than position statements.
Explaining Hans Blix, and why the Iraq War hawks think he’s “completely backtracked” to a position that “Saddam was giving us everything we wanted”, is a matter of probing simple office politics. Hans Blix is a diplomat, and in his diplomatic demenor to the US and Iraq and the UN, he’s going to offer caveats to everybody’s position… particularly the most powerful of nations, which was then on his back constantly. I have not reread Hans Blix’s testimony. But, remember some of those UN battles. Recall that a week after the Colin Powell testimony (universally heralded throughout the US media), Hans Blix blasted the testimony… in diplomatic language. (Which sent Iraq War hawks’ heads exploding in righteous anger… recall that the Washington Times (or it might have been the New York Post) published in what would otherwise be a photograph of Hans Blix a cartoon of Inspector Magoo.
I’ve been thinking of spooling together a page of “most important” pieces from this blog. Chronos, an entry posted on September 4, is entry #1 on the list. The point there is that Colin Powell, in March of 2001, said that Saddam didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction”, and Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2002 did not say that he had any. You can go from there any direction you want…