Text 2450, 119 rader
Skriven 2004-09-20 20:57:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Kerry
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This clown has no idea what he believes in...

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040920/D857LANG1.html

Kerry Says He Wouldn't Have Ousted Saddam
 
 
  

NEW YORK (AP) - Staking out new ground on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry said 
Monday he would not have overthrown Saddam Hussein had he been in the 
White House, and he accused President Bush of "stubborn incompetence," 
dishonesty and colossal failures of judgment. Bush said Kerry was flip-
flopping.

Less than two years after voting to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, 
the Democratic candidate said the president had misused that power by 
rushing to war without the backing of allies, a post-war plan or proper 
equipment for U.S. troops. "None of which I would have done," Kerry 
said.

"Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place 
in hell," he added. "But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. 
The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We 
have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

Bush hit back from a campaign rally in New Hampshire, interpreting 
Kerry's comment to mean the Democrat believes U.S. security would be 
better with Saddam still in power. "He's saying he prefers the stability 
of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy," the Republican 
incumbent said.

"Today, my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind," Bush 
said. "He apparently woke up this morning and has now decided, No, we 
should not have invaded Iraq, after just last month saying he would have 
voted for force even knowing everything we know today."

Both candidates addressed partisan crowds, drawing cheers and hoots as 
they stretched each other's records and rhetoric - mixing facts with 
political creativity toward the same goal: raising doubts about the 
other man's credibility.

Kerry called on Bush to do a much better job rallying allies, training 
Iraqi security forces, hastening reconstruction plans and ensuring that 
elections are conducted on time. But his speech was thin on details, 
with Kerry saying Bush's miscalculations had made solutions harder to 
come by.

Bush cited Kerry's four-point plan and dismissed it as proposing 
"exactly what we're currently doing."

With more than 1,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq, including nearly 900 
since Bush declared an end to major combat, with free elections in 
doubt, reconstruction efforts stalled and violence and kidnappings on 
the rise, Iraq could be Bush's biggest political liability. Even some 
Republican senators have begun to publicly second-guess the president's 
policies.

But Kerry has failed to capitalize thus far, struggling for months to 
find a clear, consistent way to differentiate his views from those of 
his Democratic rivals during the primary season and, since the spring, 
his general election foe in the White House.

Kerry's advisers say they're not sure whether it is too late for the 
Democrat to make the Iraq critique resonate. Polls show voters favor 
Bush over Kerry on Iraq and terrorism. The president shines the 
spotlight on his foreign policy agenda with a visit Tuesday to the 
United Nations.

Kerry said in August that he would have voted in 2002 to give Bush war-
making ability, even had he known no weapons of mass destruction would 
be found. He stood by the vote again Monday, saying the president needed 
to use the threat of force to "act effectively" against Saddam.

He made a distinction between that vote to grant a president war-making 
authority and what he himself would have done as commander in chief with 
such power.

"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over 
again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Bush's 
presidential rival said at New York University.

"Is he really saying to Americans that if we had known there were no 
imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, 
the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is resoundingly no 
because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise 
and responsible decision to keep America safe."

Kerry called national security "a central issue in this campaign," a bow 
to the fact that the race is being waged on Bush's terrain.

"Invading Iraq was a crisis of historic proportions and, if we do not 
change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight," he 
said.

Kerry used the word "truth" a dozen times to say Bush had dodged it. 
That doesn't count the number of times he said the president "failed to 
level" with Americans or misled and confused them. He blamed Bush for 
"colossal failures of judgment."

"This is stubborn incompetence," he said.

Kerry has sounded more hawkish, as in December when Democratic primary 
rival Howard Dean said the world was not safer with Saddam out of power. 
Anybody who believes that, Kerry said, doesn't "have the judgment to be 
president."

Reading that quote to his GOP crowd on Monday, Bush cracked: "I could 
not have said it better."

The running mates got into the act, too. "Iraq's a mess," said 
Democratic Sen. John Edwards, while Vice President Dick Cheney said 
Kerry offers only "confusion, weakness, uncertainty and indecision."


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