pro-war candidates confront debacle in Iraq and antiwar sentiment at home

The Bush administration deliberately sought war as its preferred option. It willfully caused the deaths of over one thousand American soldiers—and of tens of thousands of Iraqis—without doing “everything in its power” to avoid such a bloodletting.

Kerry, of course, avoided drawing any such conclusion. Nor was he pushed to do so. The moderator, Lehrer, made no mention of the recent declaration by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that the US war was illegal, nor did he raise the subject of US torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Kerry referred gingerly to the predatory interests that were the driving force of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. “There’s a sense of American occupation,” he said. “The only building that was guarded when the troops went into Baghdad was the oil ministry. We didn’t guard the nuclear facilities. We didn’t guard the foreign office, where you might have found information about weapons of mass destruction. We didn’t guard the borders.”

Such actions naturally led the Iraqi people to conclude that the Bush administration was interested in looting the country’s oil resources, not finding weapons of mass destruction, as Kerry admitted: “When you guard the oil ministry, but you don’t guard the nuclear facilities, the message to a lot of people is maybe, ‘Wow, maybe they’re interested in our oil.’”

Yet there was no suggestion that the armed attacks on American forces in Iraq had anything to do with the outraged and legitimate national feelings of the Iraqi people. Instead, like Bush, Kerry characterized the resistance in Iraq as terrorism, and declared that the only acceptable result was a US military victory.

Kerry absurdly compared his position on the war in Iraq to his well-publicized antiwar activities when he returned home from Vietnam. “I believe that when you know something’s going wrong, you make it right,” he said. “That’s what I learned in Vietnam. When I came back from that war I saw that it was wrong. Some people don’t like the fact that I stood up to say no, but I did... And I’m going to lead those troops to victory.”

Here the contradiction between his pretended antiwar sympathies and his actual pro-war policy reduced the Democratic candidate to near-incoherence. When Lieutenant John Kerry came home from Vietnam and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his call was not to “lead those troops to victory” but to get out of Vietnam as quickly as possible.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/deba-o05.shtml