John Kerry AGAIN Changes Positions On Iraq

29 Oct, 2004 by John Hawkins

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John Kerry has been very successfully painted as a flip-flopper who changes his positions on the issues based on who he’s talking to and what the polls look like because…well…he is a a flip-flopper who changes his positions on the issues based on who he’s talking to and what the polls look like.

I’ve harped on this before, but today Kerry again wildly swerved on Iraq.

Remember that Kerry has been bending over backwards lately to make it absolutely crystal clear that it was a mistake to go into Iraq. Here are a few quotes to emphasize my point,

“Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is no – because a Commander-in-Chief’s first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe.” — John Kerry, 9/20/04

“It’s the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” — John Kerry, 9/06/04

“Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?” — John Kerry in the first debate.

Look, there’s just not a lot of wiggle room in those statements. Kerry was clearly, definitively, saying that he would not have invaded Iraq had he been President.

Now, fast forward to the John Kerry talking to Tom Brokaw last night…

Brokaw: “If you had been President, Saddam Hussein would be in power.”

Kerry: “Not necessarily.”

Brokaw: “You said you wouldn’t go to war against him.”

Kerry: “That’s not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons.”

Brokaw: “But he wasn’t destroying them.”

Kerry: “That’s what you have inspectors for. That’s why I voted for the threat of force, because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It’s irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn’t be gone. He might be gone, because if he hadn’t complied, we might have had to go to war, but if we did, we would have gone with allies, so the American people weren’t carrying the entire burden. And the entire world would understand why we did it.”

If someone would have written a movie a year or two ago and it had a politician in it who was this dishonest, this slippery, this willing to say anything to anybody if he thinks it would help him get elected, people would have dismissed it as being unrealistic.

It’s like Kerry based his foreign policy around that classic Bill Clinton quote,

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”

Kerry, he’s like Clinton without the charm…