Is Kerry’s Position on Iraq Defensible?
Fareed Zakaria has written an interesting piece about how Kerry’s position on his Iraq resolution vote is very defensible. Here’s a snippet:
Bush’s position is that if Kerry agrees with him that Saddam was a problem, then Kerry agrees with his Iraq policy. Doing something about Iraq meant doing what Bush did. But is that true? Did the United States have to go to war before the weapons inspectors had finished their job? Did it have to junk the United Nations’ process? Did it have to invade with insufficient troops to provide order and stability in Iraq? Did it have to occupy a foreign country with no cover of legitimacy from the world community? Did it have to ignore completely the State Department’s postwar planning? Did it have to pack the Governing Council with unpopular exiles, disband the Army and engage in radical de-Baathification? Did it have to spend a fraction of the money allocated for Iraqi reconstruction—and have that be mired in charges of corruption and favoritism? Was all this an inevitable consequence of dealing with the problem of Saddam?
Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what. But there’s a thinly veiled racism behind such views, implying that Iraqis are savages genetically disposed to produce chaos and anarchy. In fact, other nation-building efforts over the past decade have gone reasonably well, when well planned and executed.
My bet is that Kerry has all of Bush’s Iraq war mistakes up his sleeve and is waiting to use them (possibly in the debates). In other words, I think Bush is setting himself up for Kerry to ask him questions similar to the ones in the paragraph from Zakaria. I realize more than a few Democrats are getting a bit nervous that he hasn’t stated his position more clearly and gone on the attack. I’m still confident that the Kerry campaign knows what it is doing. For now, we’ll have to wait and see.