Answering John Kerry’s Lame Questions

10 Aug, 2004 by John Hawkins

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Yesterday, in an attempt to answer a question posed by George Bush, John Kerry affirmed that he would have voted to give George Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq “even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.”

Of course, that long overdue answer to a very basic question must have been a devastating blow to Kerry’s liberal supporters who’ve been chanting “where are the WMD?” since the end of the war. Heck, their own candidate just said the WMD were basically irrelevant, he would have voted to give Bush the authority to invade whether he knew Saddam had them or not.

But, that’s not what I wanted to focus on.

I wanted to talk about the questions John Kerry had for George Bush, really silly questions if you ask me.

Here are the four questions Kerry posed to Bush as they were described by Reuters reporter Patricia Wilson…

1) Why (did you rush) to war without a plan for the peace?

When we went to war the 19th UN Resolution since the Gulf War asking Saddam Hussein to disarm (and yes, he was still violating the UN Resolutions) had just failed. Moreover, we spent a FULL YEAR publicly debating the war in Iraq.

George Bush took the issue before the Senate and John Kerry, among many others, voted to give Bush the authority to wage war. We even got unanimous approval from the UN Security Council to give Saddam a final “disarm or else” message and only when it was clear that it was not going to be possible to get support from the UN to invade Iraq under any circumstances did George Bush move ahead and invade.

As to the whole idea that we didn’t have a “plan”, that’s just silly. It’s an old military maxim that “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy” and the plan for post-war Iraq didn’t work out as well as anyone hoped. John Kerry knows that, just like everyone else with half a brain does.

Summing all this up, there was no rush to war and there was a plan that didn’t work out as well as we hoped…as everyone who knows anything about the lead up to war in Iraq already knows.

2) Why (did you use) faulty intelligence?

I could note that Bush wouldn’t have used the intelligence if he knew it was faulty, that the CIA and intelligence agencies all over the world all said Saddam had WMDS, and that we may still find stockpiles in Iraq or learn that Saddam shipped his WMDs out of country before the war.

But set all of that aside.

Isn’t John Kerry the same guy who said back on 10/02/02 that,

“The Iraqi regime’s record over the decade leaves little doubt that Saddam Hussein wants to retain his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and to expand it to include nuclear weapons. We cannot allow him to prevail in that quest. The weapons are an unacceptable threat.”

John Kerry might as well be asking “why did I use faulty intelligence” since his position on Iraq’s WMD’s was almost exactly the same as the one George Bush took. People should laugh at John Kerry for asking a question this hypocritical…

3) Why (did you mislead) Americans about how he would go to war?

The answer to this is easy — he didn’t. To the contrary, George Bush was extraordinarily blunt and direct about exactly what he was going to do for over a year. The only people who didn’t know George Bush was going to take Saddam out unless he complied with the UN Resolution were people living in isolated Unabomber style shacks without radios.

4) Why (didn’t you bring) other countries to the table?

What are the Brits, Poles, Australians, Italians, Japanese, South Koreans, & the other 24 countries that are still with us in Iraq — chopped liver? Apparently John Kerry thinks so because he has consistently been blowing off their contributions to the war.

And this from a guy promising Americans the moon when he gets elected. “Oh, our troops will be home in no time because I’ll get our allies to take up the slack. It’ll be as easy as pie”. Meanwhile, nobody who knows anything about foreign policy believes this.

Remember that Kerry is insulting the allies who are helping us by treating them like they don’t exist. Then you have to consider that the Iraqis don’t trust the Turks or most of their other neighbors to send in troops, so that’s pretty much a “no-go”. Then there are the French, Germans, and Spanish who have said definitively that they’re not sending in soldiers (like they’d be all that helpful even if they did).

So where are these massive numbers of soldiers going to come from? Is John Kerry having a secret clone army built a la “Star Wars”? You have to wonder because that’s the only way he’s going to replace more than 130k troops in Iraq before the Iraqis are ready to do so themselves.

These are lame questions, offered up by a lame candidate, who has lamely tried to obfuscate his real beliefs and what he intends to do once he becomes President.