[ OUR OPINION ]
Kerry finally focuses
on Bush’s Iraq policy
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Kerry said plainly this week that he would not have gone to war in Iraq if he had known what he knows today. Bush continues to insist that going to war was justified, even though intelligence assessments cited at the time were incorrect. His latest explanation -- Saddam Hussein's capability to develop nuclear weapons -- is preposterous.
"How can he possibly be serious?" Kerry asked in a speech at New York University. "Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, the United States should have invaded Iraq?" When asked later by David Letterman if he would have taken the country to war in Iraq had he been president, Kerry said simply, "No."
Kerry's explanation of his vote for a resolution authorizing the president to use military force in Iraq is understandable. The authorization should have been used as leverage in the U.N. Security Council to gain support to put pressure on Saddam. Indeed, its success in renewing weapons inspections in Iraq eliminated any imminent threat by Saddam.
Several days before Kerry's speech, The New York Times reported that a classified estimate prepared in July by the National Intelligence Council for the White House gave a bleak assessment of the Iraq situation. Its three possibilities for Iraq ranged from continued instability in political, economic and security areas to developments that could lead to a civil war.
Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voiced concern about U.S. policy in Iraq.
Lugar spoke of "the incompetence in this administration" as a reason why the administration had spent only $1 billion of $18 billion appropriated last year for Iraqi reconstruction.
Graham said, "The security situation in Iraq is going to get worse before it gets better. I think we're going to need more people over there." Hagel remarked that the United States is "in deep trouble in Iraq."
"We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders," McCain told Fox News. He said the Bush administration erred further in allowing insurgents to keep control of the city of Fallujah after vowing to remove them. "As Napoleon said, if you say you're going to take Vienna, you take Vienna," he said.
Deserving as Kerry's harsh assessment of Bush's past action is, his formula for the future is not significantly different from present policy: repairing alliances, training Iraqi security forces, improving reconstruction and ensuring elections. The Bush administration is trying to do all those things, but its success is dubious.
