Monday,
September 27 2004
THE 1997 SPEECH THAT DAMNS JOHN KERRY: The other
day Matt
Drudge caused a bit of a stir by linking to an item
in John McCaslin's Washington Times column which said that
in a 1997 debate with Representative Peter King, John Kerry
called for preemptive military action against Saddam Hussein.
(Incidentally,
today McCaslin
runs a semi-retraction - or clarification, if you prefer
- to the effect that the quote attributed to Kerry by Mr.
King was incorrect, but his paraphrasing of Kerry's comments
during the 1997 Crossfire debate was accurate. )
Some
are suggesting that, if true, Kerry's call for preemptive
military action against Iraq would represent the "ultimate
flip-flop."And they'd be right, of course.
The
reason this entire episode doesn't surprise me, however,
is because it absolutely IS true. I've already written about
it twice (here
& here),
so maybe the third time will be the charm to get this story
the attention it deserves.
On
November 9, 1997 Kerry gave a speech of his own free will
on the floor of the United States Senate that was entered
into the Congressional Record with the title, "We
Must Be Firm With Saddam Hussein."
In
the speech Kerry not only laid out the case for aggressive
military action against Saddam Hussein, he cited Saddam's
pursuit of WMD as the main rationale for action:
Kerry
went on to argue that the threat posed by Saddam was so
grave and so real that the United States should act unilaterally,
if necessary:
Let's
put these remarks in some context. Kerry gave this blistering
speech in response to the fact that on October
29, 1997, Saddam Hussein kicked U.S. weapons inspectors
out of Iraq. Kerry argued it was "unthinkable"
that Saddam be allowed to scuttle the inspection process
and defy the will of the international community.
Yet despite more
resolutions by the UN Security Council AND the
passage of a law by Congress making regime change in
Iraq the official policy of the US government AND a four-day
bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein in late 1998,
weapons inspectors did not set foot on Iraqi soil again
until the Bush administration forced them back in in November
2002.
In
the intervening four years America suffered terrorist attacks
on her embassies
in Africa, on her warship
in Yemen, and on her homeland on September
11.
So
is it plausible for John Kerry to have believed in 1997
that Saddam was a grave threat requiring the use of significant,
preemptive, and unilateral military force but to now - more
than five years later and in a post-9/11 world - stand before
us and argue the opposite? It is not.
John
Kerry's own words both then and now damn him as a man who
changes his beliefs and positions based on political expediency
and nothing more. - T. Bevan 12:15 pm Link
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