QandO
Questions and Observations| « Request | Main | Good afternoon. This is the objective and strictly impartial BBC World Service, operating on behalf of the anti-war crowd..... » |
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February 16, 2004 When an attack is not an attack In an otherwise thought-provoking defense of John Kerry's voting record regarding Iraq, Matt Yglesias writes this... Matt is making the point that it's not inconsistent to want to wait for more allies to do a full-scale invasion, but not demand the same level of participation for small-scale missile attacks.In 1998, when President Clinton was considering military steps against Iraq, he strenuously argued for action, with or without allies.The Post is being disingenuous here. The actions being contemplated -- limited air strikes against military and WMD targets -- were nothing like the actions being contemplated four years later. ... It makes perfect sense to say that allies are dispensable for some things and indispensible for other, different things. The media's insistency that candidates take "consistent" positions even when the issues in question are not the same really pisses me off. As far as it goes, it sounds good...but I don't see what it has to do with John Kerry. In 1998, John Kerry signed a resolution urging the President to "take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end his weapons of mass destruction program." That President Clinton chose to send missiles, as opposed to Marines is quite irrelevant. Kerry signed the same resolution in 1998 as he signed in 2002....but in 1998, he didn't place UN-related restrictions on Clinton's use of "any force necessary". Matt is exonerating Kerry ex post facto, but the authorizations Kerry signed don't differ enough to validate this exoneration. In one case, Kerry authorized Clinton to use all necessary and appropriate action to deal with Saddam....in 2002, he signed for the same thing. Moreover, Kerry opposed the Presidents push to war, based not on the quality of the coalition, but on the lack of UN approval.... This president has done it wrong every step of the way. He has a fraudulent coalition. He promised he would go through the UN and honor the inspections process. He did not.Kerry says the war was the right thing to do, but only if done the right way. That "right way", per Kerry, was not simply "with enough partners", but "through the UN". It's more complicated than that, though. Even Kerry asserted our right to act outside the UN, saying.... Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.So, Kerry said he would support the war if the UN refused to enforce its resolutions. Specifically, Kerry wrote in the NYTimes "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act.". Meanwhile, back at the UN, "China, France and Russia oppose any resolution that leads to war." What is that, if not a failure of the Security Council to act? When John Kerry describes a "fraudulent coalition", he is not describing an inadequate coalition - he is describing an illegal coalition. One that didn't abide by the UN process. And that is EXACTLY what he supported in 1998. |