Suppose John F. Kerry, the candidate of the Democratic Party, defeats President Bush in November. What impact such a change would have on American policy in Iraq and the Middle East in general. According to one widely held myth, Kerry would reverse the Bush administration’s warlike stance. Some myths contain elements of truth, but the myth whereby Kerry would reverse Bush’s Middle East policy is not one of them. Kerry essentially offers “an echo, not a choice,” as two American columnists have styled his proposed policy. The irony of a Kerry victory would be that while the failed war in Iraq would have helped him into power, once there he would continue to carry on Bush’s war policies.
Even neocon war hawk Bill Kristol has noted the similarities between Bush and Kerry. “The most important thing . . . I thought is how similar it (Kerry’s proposed policy) really is to Bush administration policy, and that I say in praise of him (Kerry) . . . . He is not willing to cut and run from Iraq . . . . He wants the UN to be more involved, but he doesn’t say if we can’t get the UN more involved, we should get out. President Bush is trying to get the UN involved, too.”
Youssef M. Ibrahim, former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, and a critic of the US war agenda, couches Kerry’s similarities to Bush in far bleaker terms: “For three years the world fumed over the chauvinism, arrogance and policies of Republican neoconservatives (neocons as they are known) riding over George W. Bush’s administration. They advocated regime changes and wars-of-choice. They dumped the Western alliance, forged even stronger bonds with Israel, dropping the Palestinians altogether, and occupied Iraq.
“But for those millions, who aspire to better days under a Democratic administration led by Sen. John Kerry, think again. The Democratic Party’s neocon vampires are a lot worse than the current ones — the second movie could be more frightening than the first.”
While some politicians manage to at least gull the American electorate with pleasant lies, Kerry does not even make much of a rhetorical effort to placate his antiwar constituency. In his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination, he mouthed the old platitudes about fighting terrorism and staying the course in Iraq. As for his “differences” with Bush, Kerry promised that he would not “mislead” the country into war, a safe position to take, since the pro-lie constituency is miniscule; and he promised that he would secure help from other countries to “share the burden” of occupying Iraq, another safe position, since it would be pleasant to have some foreigners blown up instead of Americans.
The Democratic leadership managed to craft a pro-war platform, which essentially blames the Bush administration for its ineffective prosecution of the war with the complaint that it “did not send sufficient forces to accomplish the mission.” For the present and future, the platform calls for keeping US troops in Iraq until the establishment of a stable government, because the United States could not “allow a failed state in Iraq that inevitably would become a haven for terrorists and a destabilizing force in the Middle East.”
The supporters of Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat’s peace candidate, attempted to insert an anti-war plank that called the invasion of Iraq a mistake, which was backed petitions signed by more than 200,000 people. But the Democratic leadership derailed it .
Before continuing with Kerry’s current positions, we should briefly examine the background on the political positioning on the war. Although most Democratic politicians initially backed Bush’s position on Iraq, strong opposition to the war arose among the Democratic rank-and-file and coalesced in 2003 behind the insurgent candidacy of Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. Dean, however, faltered in the early primary elections of 2004, owing in large part to Democratic establishment and mainstream media opposition, and Sen. Kerry immediately emerged as the frontrunner. Although not the first choice of most Democrats, he was regarded as the Democrat who had the best chance of defeating Bush. After a number of primary victories, Kerry became the almost-certain Democratic presidential nominee, which was made official in his nomination at the Democratic Convention on July 29.
Despite the anti-war attitude of many ordinary Democrats, Kerry had supported the Bush agenda on Iraq from the beginning. He not only voted for the October 2002 congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, but he went so far as to repeat some of the Bush administration’s most outrageous (and fallacious) claims regarding Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a speech on the Senate floor immediately prior to the October 2002 military force resolution, Kerry categorically maintained that Saddam Hussein was “attempting to develop nuclear weapons.” In fact, Kerry asserted that Iraq’s WMD threatened the United States itself. “Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives which could bring them to the United States homeland.” Instead of questioning the validity of the Bush administration’s ominous warnings, Kerry confirmed them. “The president laid out a strong, comprehensive, and compelling argument why Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs are a threat to the United States and the international community.”
Kerry has since claimed to have been fooled by the Bush administration’s false claims about Iraq’s WMD. However, there would seem to have been no reason for Kerry to have uncritically accepted the Bush administration’s war propaganda. Unlike the general public, Kerry had access to contrary information. As columnist Robert Novak has pointed out, “as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability.”
During the time he was actively campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Kerry argued that he did not actually vote for war but rather for a process to disarm Saddam, in which military force would only be undertaken after all diplomatic possibilities had been exhausted. “I voted to give the authority to the president to use force under a set of promises by the president as to how he would do it: Build a legitimate international coalition, exhaust the remedies of the United Nations, and go to war as a last resort. He broke every single one of those promises.” Kerry continued to maintain that his vote was correct: “I believed then — and I believe now — authorizing force was the only way to get inspectors in, and the only way ultimately to enforce Saddam Hussein’s compliance with the mandate he had agreed to, knowing that as a last resort war could become the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism.”
There is a small grain of truth in what Kerry said. In a speech on the Senate floor in early October 2002, Kerry did say that he expected President Bush to work in harmony with the United Nations and America’s allies: “In giving the president this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days: To work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out ‘tough, immediate’ inspections requirements and to ‘act with our allies at our side’ if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be the first to speak out.”
But in fact Kerry did not speak out when the Bush administration moved to a unilateral war, even though leading Senate Democrats, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, put forth a resolution to prevent such belligerent action. As commentator John C. Bonifaz observes: “Sen. Kerry broke that promise . . . In the crucial days after the president withdrew his efforts to gain United Nations support for his war and before the president launched his invasion, Sen. Kerry remained silent. The president had, indeed, failed to build an international coalition, and yet the senator did not speak out.”
Immediately after the American attack on Iraq began on March 19, 2003, Kerry expressed nothing but support for the American action. “It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism. If so, the only exit strategy is victory, this is our common mission and the world’s cause.”
— Stephen J. Sniegoski holds a Ph.D. in American history, specializing in American foreign policy, and is the author of several historical articles.
