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--THE WAFFLE OVER THE WAR
No single decision in Kerry's long Senate career has been so avidly dissected as his vote authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq. It was votes like his that gave rise to Howard Dean; his insurgent campaign drew most of its early oxygen from voters angry at the Democrats in Washington, who seemed unable or unwilling to keep the President on any kind of leash. Cynics noted that all the Democrats with national aspirations--including Edwards, Lieberman, Kerry and, down the road, Hillary Clinton--had voted for the war. In Kerry's case, it was viewed as an antidote to his 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, since he couldn't be seen as soft on Saddam twice in a row.
But the 1991 vote was the exception to the rule. Kerry had supported the use of force in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Somalia in 1992, Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. He supports adding 40,000 troops to the overextended armed services. As Kerry put it in his Sept. 2 announcement speech in South Carolina, "We may well have to use force to fight terrorism. I will not hesitate to do so. But if I am President, the United States will never go to war because we want to. We will only go to war because we have to."
The problem is not that Kerry voted for a war that most Americans still say they support. The problem is what he said about his reasoning when the vote became toxic among the Democratic faithful. Under pressure to explain, he declared during his announcement speech, "I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations." Threaten? Even at the time, it was clear the resolution was more than an invitation to rattle a sword. "Everyone knew what was going on," says a senior Democratic Senate aide. "People understood we were giving the President the authority to do what he needed to do. You could see anything you wanted to in the resolution. But the lesson the Democrats learned from 1991 was that if you voted against the 2002 resolution, you were no longer viable as a national candidate. They were gaming the system."
It took Kerry many news cycles to get to the point where he could explain his stance coherently. He finally argued that he had to vote as though he were President--that for Bush to maximize his leverage at the U.N., he needed to show that Congress was behind him. But then, Kerry argues, Bush broke his side of the deal by barely going through the motions to assemble the kind of international coalition that his father had 11 years before, stomping headlong into war, trampling valuable alliances and precedents, and then utterly botching the peace.