Fit to Lead?

During the primary campaign, a prominent Democratic Senator challenged Howard Dean’s anti-war stance by proclaiming:

those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.

That was
John Kerry on December 16. How does that square with Kerry’s more recent remarks?

Update:Several readers think that the above is “unfair” and a “cheap shot.” One reader, for example, writes that launching an attack on North Korea would clearly be the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” yet if the war were successful, it would be irresponsible to argue that the world was not better off without Kim Jong-Il in power. Perhaps. But if the cost of the war were the utter annihilation of the Korean peninsula – a likely possibility – it would not be at all clear that the world was “better off.” I think this is a fair reading of Kerry’s response to Dean in December 2003.

Back then, in response to criticisms of his pro-war stance from Howard Dean, Kerry argued that the world was clearly safer with Hussein’s removal. Now, Kerry is arguing that the U.S. should not have gone to war with Iraq when it did (though he says he still would have voted for the resolution authorizing the use of military force). I will concede that parsing any one or two of Kerry’s statements about the war might show there is no inherent inconsistency, but when all of Kerry’s statements about the war in Iraq over the past year are taken together, I think it is very hard to argue he has had a consistent position.

In a related note, Kerry is also simultaneously claiming that 1,000 Americans have died in the “war on terror,” a figure that includes casualties in Iraq, and that the war in Iraq is not part of the war on terror. I suppose there might be a way to reconcile these statements too, but I don’t see it.

Another Update:For what it’s worth, On July 26, Kerry-Edwards campaign chair Jeanne Shaheen said on CNBC’s Capitol Report: “people understand that the war in Iraq, unlike what George Bush told us, has not made us safer.”

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