Kerry: "I accept...responsibility"

[sandnsea]

"Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not the reason America went to war. The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq.... There is, as Robert Kennedy once said, ‘enough blame to go around,’ and I accept my share of the responsibility."

That is the difference between John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

http://kerry.senate.gov/v3/cfm/record.cfm?id=247764

[politicasista]

1. K&R

:kick:

[Proud2BAmurkin]

2. That doesn't even mean anything. Clinton never "denied responsibility"

She just put the blame where it belongs, on the shithead, because a good president would use the IWR for leverage only.

[MercutioATC]

3. She put a gun in the hands of an evil moron.

Her action carries a guilt of its own. She should admit that guilt.

[jasmine621]

4. And please show me the difference again. I must have gone blind and

brain dead.

[MH1]

6. Kerry: "I accept my share of responsibility"

for his IWR vote.

Clinton: I didn't know. (or some variation thereof)

If you can find a better quote from Hillary Clinton that compares more closely with what John Kerry said, please do provide the link.

[sandnsea]

13. She says everybody thought there were WMD

but still refuses to acknowledge the lies of the Bushies. The reason is because there were Clinton people telling those same lies, people who should have known better.

I still don't know what in the hell Joe Wilson is doing, considering Bill is the one who said we ought to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on yellowcake.

[ProSense]

5. More difference:

Kerry, unlike Hillary, spoke out against Bush several times before Bush invaded

[davidwparker]

7. That's one. The other: President Clinton and VP Gore were wrong about

NAFTA and the WTO. After putting into place my 6 month program to have our troops out of Iraq, I will remove us from WTO/NAFTA. I will also reverse the 1996 Telcom act.

Unless Hillary does these three things, I will never cast a vote for Billary in the primaries and I hope she looses badly.

These people know what the problems are, but don't have the backbone to speak truth to power.

[Nederland]

8. 1996 Telcom Act?

I've worked in telcom for the last 8 years. What's you beef with this law? Just curious...

[davidwparker]

11. Consolidating the ownership of media to a few large corporations.

[sandnsea]

9. I will hold my nose for Hillary

But I refuse to pretend she is just as good as any other Democrat. She and the DLC set us up for all that has gone wrong in the last 8 years.

[rpannier]

10. Nice start

How about accepting responsibility for raising the white flag in 04.

[percussivemadness]

27. amen to that :)

[Barack_America]

12. Yep. I have no use for politicians who can't admit mistakes...

I've lived under one for the past 8 years and I hope that I never have to live under another one.

[mtnsnake]

14. Kerry is a bigger hypocrite than Obama. He never apologized until it was politically safe to do so

[BootinUp]

20. Yep. Hillary is the one that has been consistent.

And she rightly holds Bush accountable.

[Major Hogwash]

45. Coming from you - that's a compliment.

Seriously. You will never stop trashing anyone that doesn't agree with your opinion - you're a bigger hypocrite than Hillary is!

[krkaufman]

15. Many Senators, including Kerry and Clinton, were not misled into war ...

... unless they're referring to their having been misled by themselves. Yes, we were all lied to by the Bush Administration, but US Senators could have read the full, 92-page classified Iraq NIE, as they were emplored to do by Senator Bob Graham, if they had cared to do the basic due diligence prior to voting for sending troops to war.

As Sen. Graham stated, Kerry, Clinton and the rest have blood on their hands.

[sandnsea]

16. And Kerry accepts responsibility

Which is the point of my post.

Not to mention, he spoke out against Bush's rush to war since Jan 2003. Kerry opposed the war and tried to get the party and the country to care about all of Bush's lies. Hillary didn't, she was saying "stay the course" when John Kerry was offering a plan to end the war in 2005. The difference is stark.

[krkaufman]

17. Actually, it doesn't appear that Sen. Kerry is accepting responsibility at all.

... at least when it comes to this statement, you quoted and with which I was specifically taking issue:

"The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq...."

Had Sen. Kerry read the full, 92-page classified Iraq NIE, he would have known then what he knows now, so it is not truthful to say that "we were not given the truth." US Senators had access to the truth, but only 6 opted to read the full NIE.

Kerry's quoted acceptance of responsibility is parsing the truth. He holds nowhere near the blame of Bush et al, but he is considerably more guilty than what he admitted in that statement.

And I still resent Kerry claiming to have been misled into war when he and nearly every other Democratic politician have done nothing to hold Bush accountable for having done so. Kerry's declaration rings hollow.

[sandnsea]

19. The NIE didn't have the yellowcake lie

Not everything was in that NIE and there was a lot of info that wasn't in it. I'm not arguing his vote, I'm saying he has accepted resonsibility for his vote and challenged Bush's war lies, the lies that went into the NIE as well. She hasn't done any of it.

[krkaufman]

23. I think you might be assuming I'm defending Hillary.

I agree that she and Kerry are identically culpable for getting us into the war (though Kerry's vote without reading the Iraq NIE was highly hypocritical given his speeches during the anti-Vietnam war years) and that Hillary has been more pro-war for longer.

I was merely trying to point-out that Kerry is doing the same thing as Hillary... blaming their vote on being misled, and trusting Bush. In the Iraq NIE, they had the information to have cast enough doubt on the case for war to counter the misinformation, and not recognizing that Bush would use the authorization to take the country to war was a monumental failure of judgment.

[sandnsea]

25. No, she isn't saying that at all

She hasn't challenged Bush's lies at all. I think you're missing my point. I'll get back to Kerry in a minute, and this is important to me outside of this primary.

Hillary has just said the intelligence was wrong, that ALL the intelligence and experts all over the world just, oops, got it wrong. She has never recognized the lies or the neocon agenda that led to the lies. They cooked the books. They put emphasis on some aspects of the intelligence and put the counter arguments in the footnotes. They hyped things in the media all out of proportion. I've spent an enormous amount of time going through the actual documents to see how they did it and they set out to deceive the people of this country. Why won't Hillary acknowledge what the Bushies and his neocon cabal did? And why is she standing right beside him as he does it again with Iran? That is what concerns me, terrifies me really. We are not going to get a new foreign policy with Hillary.

As to Kerry. I don't know why he made the actual vote. I do know his remarks were much more targeted to the WMD and much more insistent that he did not support regime change for the sake of regime change. Clearly he knew there was an underlying agenda by the Bushies that he was concerned about. As it became clearer that the Bushies were going to absolutely push to war, he began speaking out, in Jan 2003. Every step he took after that point was an attempt to end the war and acknowledge we shouldn't be in Iraq. That was very different from Hillary who consistently argued that we had to "stay the course" and win the war and nonsense such as that.

Bush intentionally lied us into this war and the ones who are willing to stand up and say it and acknowledge the failure that allowed it to happen are okay in my book. Obama got the whole thing right from the beginning, including the Perle/Wolfowitz ideology, and that's the most important thing of all.

[krkaufman]

28. We seem to be arguing over shades of the same color.

I acknowledge your points re: Kerry, but would need to research his comments on being questioned about having not read the Iraq NIE to accept his acceptance of responsibility as fully genuine.

Re: Hillary... we're on the same page... except I thought that, in the last debate, she described our being misled into war and that she had trusted Bush to put all efforts into a diplomatic solution. (She did a good job channeling Condi Rice in avoiding the actual name of the Iraq resolution.) Hillary's been all over the place in rationalizing her vote, and, as you indicate, has never really accepted responsibility or admitted it as a mistake.

[sandnsea]

31. These people live and breathe intelligence

Honestly, I don't think reading or not reading the NIE is all that important. What's important is their world view and their integrity and honesty overall. Like I say, I don't know for a fact why John Kerry made that vote. I do know every move he has made since then as he is my favorite person in the world. I trust that he probably sees that vote as the worst mistake he's ever made, he owns it and is doing everything he can to make up for it. Ending the war in Iraq isn't enough, changing the mindset that got us into that war is what is necessary. I think John Kerry has been trying to do that since 1971 and he asked whether Vietnam would be the place "where America finally turned". That he was also one of the first to come out for Obama, even after he lost NH, well that speaks volumes to me too. When he tells you he accepts responsibility for that vote, I promise you that every single day there is agony, and many days tears, that accompany it.

[krkaufman]

33. Re: "I don't think reading or not reading the NIE is all that important. "

Based on the protestations of Sen. Bob Graham and other Senators who did read the document, on this point we'll have to differ.

Yes, we were misled into war, but some people had information available that they chose to ignore -- even while their fellows implored them to do otherwise.

[sandnsea]

35. I agree with that

I also think the Clinton people had a huge impact on that based on John Edwards specifically saying he was not lied into war - he listened to the Clinton people who told him there were WMD. I honestly believe the Clinton people are dangerous to our future and I think it's because they buy into the whole globalization thing with no regard to the consequences. There's a difference between opening global economies to lift people up and corporate trade to enrich the elite.

[krkaufman]

36. Agreed. I'm not a big fan of Albright or Holbrooke. They seem to be a tad too hawkish.

And I've had enough of free markets and globalization, thank you.

Should we allow our corporations to dump toxic waste into our waterways? Should we outlaw labor unions and collective bargaining? Should workers be forced to work 7-day weeks, if their employer needs? Should our corporations be unrestricted by legislation in the amount of pollution allowed into the air?

If one answers no to any of the above, then why is it OK that our companies must compete against foreign companies that are allowed to do so? Trade agreements without enforceable quality of life stipulations are simply end-arounds the safety, environmental and labor rights gains of our ancestors. We're effectively shipping our jobs back to pre-1900.

[karynnj]

42. There are other Kerry statement's even in that speech that were more specific

Saying specifically that he "accepts his share of responsibility". The other thing is that Kerry has spoken of speaking to both the American and British intelligence people and to Colin Powell. The problem is that no inspectors were in for 4 years and you can't prove a negative. So, he would NOT have known what was known now.

Even in 2004, the things Kerry cited as having been what they were misled on were what Bush said he would do but didn't. In his IWR speech he did not say there were WMD, but that there was a possibility that needed to be investigated. His assessment of the situation was not that different from Feingolds - Kerry even said that at that point their was no imminent threat. Kerry could have given near the same speech and voted no. He said in 2004, that he thought it important to give the President leverage.

As to trying to hold them accountable he has been one of the most persistent critics. He also got only 10 Senators - not HRC- to sign his letter on the WMD part 2 that was to investigate whether there was political manipulation. He asked that they investigate the Downing Street Memos.

[krkaufman]

46. The main thing he would have learned from the Iraq NIE was that nearly all the intelligence ...

... was up for debate, whereas the NIE summary document had filtered-out all the "no WMDs" counter-arguments.

Even by October of 2002, anyone taking Bush's word that he would exhaust all diplomatic routes was allowing themselves to be deceived. It was obvious that Bush was bent on war and that any diplomatic efforts were being accommodated simply because there was ample time to do so between October and the planned start of the war in March.

Re: "He thought it important to give the President leverage." Leverage I'm OK with. Authorization to go to war, not so much. It was poor judgment *and* abrogation of Kerry's Senatorial responsibilities regarding declaration of war.

Re: "Kerry could have given near the same speech and voted no." True. Which is why what he *said* has little to no meaning; and how he voted says everything. Senate speeches provide cover for future inspection; but the vote remains the same.

Re: "As to trying to hold them accountable he has been one of the most persistent critics." Criticism is, of course, not accountability. Credit to Kerry if he's tried *actually* holding someone accountable, but has failed to gain sufficient support from his fellows.

In my opinion, the one action these Senators can take, irrespective of the actions and cooperation of others, to show true regret and assumption of responsibility for their failure in regards to the Iraq vote is to resign. Anything short of that is politicking.

[karynnj]

49. The other way to show regret is to do what he did

To do the hard work that he did in the various plans he put forward - he is the person who has done the most to shift the country on this. This was better than resigning. He also would have done better than anyone in ending it had he won in 2004.

On the WMD report (DSM) he did make a huge effort to get more support - but there were only 1o Senators willing to sign on.

[BootinUp]

21. They didn't vote "for war" so your argument is voided.

They voted to force Sadaam to yield to UN Resolutions. Which he then did. This is Bushes war end of story.

[krkaufman]

24. Re: "your argument is voided" -- Chortle! Your opinion is not determinant.

... especially when it appears to be channeling Condoleeza Rice.

[BootinUp]

26. Voting "for war" would be a declaration of war. nt

[krkaufman]

29. I doubt that the families of over 30,000 US casualties ...

... and millions of Iraqis would find any comfort in such parsing of words.

"Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002." -- This authorization was more craven than a declaration of war, as it ceded what is supposed to be a Congressional responsibility to the President. So, anyone voting for it lacked not just judgment but a clear understanding of their Constitutional duty.

[BootinUp]

32. It was clear that the vote was to force inspections

and they commenced almost immediately.

Blame bush not democrats. And read Sen Hagel explanation on why the Democrats couldn't have stopped him anyways.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=4360083

[krkaufman]

34. Re: "blame Bush not Democrats"

The two are not mutually exclusive. And I don't blame "Democrats." I blame specific Democrats who failed in judgment and in their responsibility.

Re: "it was clear the vote was to force inspections" ... That was certainly the meme being pushed, but many recognized that as cover and, factually, the terms of the resolution ceded war powers to the President.

Over & out.

[karynnj]

37. The war would have occured without the resolution

and the resolution would have happened without their votes. The damage done was that they made it easier for the Republicans to say that both parties were behind it - and in this they were helped by the left that conflated the vote in October with the decision to go to war in March. There was a thread here last week where the majority of DUers were insisting that the two were "within weeks of each other" or that the "resolution led to removing the inspectors".

The problem was that it was Bush and only Bush who had to assess if the conditions were met. He said they were when it was patently obvious that they weren't. Here is where I think Kerry has less guilt than HRC. Assuming each were sincere in their reasons, when Bush clearly deviated, you would expect some outrage and that they would speak out - that is what happened with Kerry, but not HRC. Kerry may have thought that with people speaking out as inspectors were in and there were diplomatic moves left that pressure would be on Bush not to invade. (I know war was likely near inevitable, this process that they pushed Bush to agree with (that he disregarded) may have seemed a slight chance.)

As to Graham's comments - even if the intelligence showed that there was a question as to whether there were WMD, that did not rule it out. At that time no inspectors had been there for 4 years. Pakistan built a bomb without the world knowing and neighboring former USSR had unsecured WMD.

The problem was not the lies on WMD, it was more the lies on what he would do with the authority. He really didn't do what he said. In fact, had he done waht he said it could have been a big Bush victory, Iraq destroyed missiles and real investigations occurred. It could have led to the lifting of the deadly sanctions - that should never have been left in place for more than a decade.

But except for cheerleaders of the war, NO ONE but Bush and the people with him had the real choice of invading or not invading.

[ErnestoG]

18. Well said.

[rug]

22. I'll believe he accepts responsibility when he starts paying for funerals.

[ErnestoG]

38. How many has Her Majesty paid for?

or even attended?

None? Thank you.

[rug]

40. She isn't going around somberly saying I accept responsibility when he's done shit about it.

You're welcome.

[blm]

41. He submitted the first Iraq withdrawal bill in Oct2005 and subsequent bills

to try and make right.

His position has finally become the overwhelming Dem position by the end of 1997 when before most Dems had stayed in support of Bush.

[rug]

43. August 9, 2004:

But on Aug. 9, 2004, when asked if he would still have gone to war knowing Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Kerry said: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.” Speaking to reporters at the edge of the Grand Canyon, he added: “ I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has."

I believe he had the pulpit when he said that.

[blm]

48. Yeah - he would have let the weapon inspectors' findings dictate the need for force.

He said Bush had no need to invade because the weapon inspections were working and proving force not necessary, Just as he stated before, during and after the invasion.

What part of that consistent stance is a mystery to you?

[rug]

50. "when asked if he would still have gone to war knowing Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons

of mass destruction, Kerry said: “Yes, I would have"

What part of that idiocy eludes you?

[blm]

52. He was at the Grand Canyon - read the whole answer - he said he would have

voted for the RESOLUTION again. He didn't hear 'to war' and didn't answer he'd have gone into war.

The bottom line is the resolution isn't what took this country to war, Bush violated that resolution when he made his decision to invade and LIED saying the determination was made for our national security when weapon inspections were proving the exact opposite.

[rug]

53. He resolved to go to war but did not intend to go to war?

[blm]

54. There were weapon inspections first - if inspectors found reason for force being

needed then Bush would have had that option.

But when it comes down to it, Bush would have invaded no matter HOW the resolution was written - even if it was written to get Kucinich's vote - he already intended to violate ANY resolution. That is what the Downing Street Memos prove.

[Bread and Circus]

30. Hillary believes we can't handle the truth

[Skip Intro]

39. Why can't he just apologize????

Actually, his statements are almost identical to Hillary's.

Don't get the point of the thread...

[Major Hogwash]

44. Thank you for this post.

And THAT is the difference between John Kerry and Hillary Clinton!

[jlake]

47. Kerry Cannot trash Hillary for her vote when he made the same one - despite

their possible different actions after the vote.
He had the same "poor" judgment Hillary did.

[Cha]

51. Kerry and John Edwards have

both come around and learned from the whole experience of the bushits bombing Iraq. hilary hasn't learned a thing but how to better smear her Democratic opponents so she and bil can go back to the whitehouse.