Kerry Attacks Bush Over Iraq Policies
John Kerry has attacked Bush for "disdaining diplomacy" in favour of a confrontational foreign policy that has left America "less safe.""War is the ultimate failure of diplomacy," Kerry told a gathering of the Pacific Council on International Policy. "Yet our current leadership has arrogantly discarded this basic principle…. All too often they disdained diplomacy as little more than an inconvenient detour on the chosen path to armed conflict."
The result, he said, was an ill-advised rush to war in Iraq that alienated other governments and diminished sympathy for the US generated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. America's current isolation, and the presence of thousands of US troops in Iraq, is "playing right into Iranian hands…. The Iranians are delighted," Kerry said.
Emphasizing that a nuclear-armed Iran would be "a very serious threat to the US and our allies," Kerry contended that the most conservative estimates are that Tehran is at least five years away from developing atomic weapons. "There is time for diplomacy to work here."
He applauded Rice's offer to negotiate with Iran whilst warning that any future talks "must be more than an effort to check the box on diplomacy as they move toward a confrontation."
He also berated the Bush administration's attitude towards the current impasse in Iraq where important positions in the new government have yet to be filled.
The sight of politicians haggling over Cabinet seats in the midst of an undiminished insurgency is "a disgrace, and this administration ought to get tough," he said.
Most startlingly of all, he says that he is going to attach an amendment to this summer's defense appropriations bill calling for all US troops to be withdrawn by the end of the year, a move that he admits will be unpopular.
I think the reason I find all this so startling is that it looks like leadership, he is actually proposing doing things that will make a difference, as opposed to Bush's "steady as we go" policy in Iraq which has produced almost no results other than the continuing carnage.
Things could have been so very different had the US made a different choice.
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6 comments:
So Kerry was "for the war in Iraq before he was against it," right? LoL.
No, he's against the mismanagement of the war by the idiot savant.
Then what is he proposing be done differently? He didn't seem to have any concrete plans back during the last election cycle, did he?
Why do you post anonymously? Are you frightened to own your own opinions? Identify yourself, or at the very least give yourself some recognisable nickname if you expect to be taken seriously.
OK. Call me John Doe.
His call to force the new Iraqi government to appoint a full cabinet or face American withdrawal is certainly different from Bush's "maintain the course - all is fine" non policy.
And at the last election he maintained that the Iraq war was a diversion from the war on terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
And it's a lie to say that he voted for the war before he turned against it. He voted to give the President the power to go to war as a last resort.
As he argued during the first presidential debate, the President did not do that.
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