Notes from www.wintersoldier.com

Calif. Hunter

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o In his April 1971 speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, John Kerry claimed that war crimes committed by the American military against Vietnamese civilians were "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis..." War crimes in Vietnam were actually quite rare.

o Kerry claimed that war crimes were committed "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." The truth is that war crimes were never a matter of policy, and were prosecuted when discovered.

o Kerry charged that the war in Vietnam was a racist war, that "blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties." In reality, casualty rates for black and white soldiers during Vietnam closely matched their proportions of America's overall population.

o Kerry claimed that Vietnam was "ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism..." Later in his remarks, Kerry responded to a question about what might happen to the South Vietnamese after our withdrawal with "So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America..." Yet according to historian Guenter Lewy in "America in Vietnam," "...the number of civilians killed deliberately by the VC is appallingly high. No counterpart to this death toll caused by communist terror tactics exists on the allied side."

o Asked for a recommendation about possible courses of action for Congress to pursue, Kerry stated that he had talked with representatives from Hanoi and from the PRG (Viet Cong) at the Paris peace talks, and mentioned his support for "Madam Binh's points." Madam Win Thi Binh was at that time the Foreign Minister for the PRG.

o Kerry was a leader, fund-raiser, and spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that staged mock mass murders of civilians to dramatize American atrocities, and handed out flyers that read "if you had been Vietnamese" American infantrymen might have "burned your house" or "raped your wife and daughter" and "American soldiers do these things every day to the Vietnamese simply because they are 'Gooks.'"

o Kerry's used "testimony" from the VVAW's "Winter Soldier Investigation" as the basis for his war crimes charges. Later investigators were unable to confirm the charges, and in fact discovered that a number of the witnesses were never in Vietnam, never in combat, or were imposters who had assumed the identity of real veterans.

o The deception extended to the VVAW leadership. Executive secretary Al Hubbard claimed to have been an Air Force captain wounded piloting a transport over Da Nang in 1966. Hubbard was actually a staff sergeant who had never been assigned to Vietnam.

o The Winter Soldier Investigation was financed by pro-Hanoi radicals such as Jane Fonda and Mark Lane, who hoped to undermine American support for the war by framing American soldiers as mass murderers. At the same time, the North Vietnamese military was torturing American prisoners of war to make them confess to identical crimes. At least one former POW has stated that Kerry's testimony was used by North Vietnam to demoralize American prisoners during interrogations.

o The VVAW signed the People's Peace Treaty during Kerry's tenure -- the VVAW even sent a delegation to Hanoi. The document was a laundry list of North Vietnamese bargaining points, including the key concession that the United States must agree to withdraw all troops before any negotiations could take place for the return of American prisoners.

o The VVAW was at the heart of the propaganda effort that so effectively smeared American servicemen in Vietnam as murderous, drug-addled psychotics that returning veterans were cursed and spat upon in the streets. In fact, as shown in B.G. Burkett's book "Stolen Valor," Vietnam veterans are more psychologically stable and successful than their civilian counterparts.

http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=New
 
Here is a flyer from the above url that tells you what these guys are all about

VVAW06.jpg
 
Originally posted by BHR:
Hangar 18,

Sure is nice to see a young guy with a brain. There is hope.

Paul
Uhhh... Paul, just what did Hangar do to impress you? It sure doesn't seem like that much. All he did was mention that the photo above was a FAKE and he provided the link to Snopes.com, that has the story about how the photo is fake. But I thought everybody had already heard ont he news that the photo was a fake. :confused:

It sure seems like you are easily impressed with our local Metallica fan's brain. :rolleyes:

Actually, on some topics Hangar is a pretty good poster. He generally knows his chit before he posts, and he keeps it civil, even when he is on the wrong side.... ;)
 
John Kerry was wounded in his first significant combat action, when he volunteered for a special mission on 2 December 1968:

"It was a half-assed action that hardly qualfied as combat, but it was my first, and that made it very exciting," [Kerry said]. "Three of us, two enlisted men and myself, had stayed up all night in a Boston Whaler [a foam-filled-fiberglass boat] patrolling the shore off a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh . . . Most of the night had been spent being scared shitless by fisherman whom we would suddenly creep up on in the darkness. Once, one of the sailors was so startled by two men who surprised us as we came around a corner ten yards from the shore that he actually pulled the trigger on his machine gun. Fortunately for the two men, he had forgotten to switch off the safety . . ."

As it turned out, the two men really were just a pair of innocent fisherman who didn't know where one zone began and the other ended. Their papers were perfectly in order, if their night's fishing over. The fear was that they were VC. Allowing them to continue might have compromised the mission. For the next four hours Kerry's Boston Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans, all operating in a curfew zone, back to the Swift. It was tiring work. "We deposited them with the Swift boat that remained out in the deep water to give us cover," Kerry continued. "Then, very early in the morning, around 2:00 or 3:00, while it was still dark, we proceeded up the tiny inlet between the island and the peninsula to the point designated as our objective. The jungle closed in on us on both sides. It was scary as hell. You could hear yourself breathing. We were almost touching the shore. Suddenly, through the magnified moonlight of the infrared 'starlight scope,' I watched, mesmerized, as a group of sampans glided in toward the shore. We had been briefed that this was a favorite crossing area for VC trafficking contraband."

With its motor turned off, Kerry paddled the Boston Whaler out of the inlet into the beginning of the bay. Simultaneously the Vietnamese pulled their sampans up onto the beach and began to unload something; he couldn't tell what, so he decided to illuminate the proceedings with a flare. The entire sky seemed to explode into daylight. The men from the sampans bolted erect, stiff with shock for only an instant before they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles Kerry had once seen on TV's Wild Kingdom. "We opened fire," he went on. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach, strafing it. Then it was quiet.

"We stayed quiet and low because we did not want to illuminate ourselves at that point," Kerry explained. "In the dead of night, without any knowledge of what kind of force was there, we were not all about to go crawling on the beach to get our asses shot off. We were unprotected; we didn't have ammunition, we didn't have cover, we just weren't prepared for that . . . So we first shot the sampans so that they were destroyed and whatever was in them was destroyed." Then their cover boat warned of a possible VC ambush in the small channel they had to exit through, and Kerry and company departed the area.
 
Kerry earned his second Purple Heart while returning from a PCF mission up the Bo De River on 20 February 1969:

One of the mission's support helicopters had been hit by small-arms fire during the trip up the Bo De and the rest had returned with it to their base to refuel and get the damage inspected. While there the pilots found that they wouldn't be able to return to the Swifts for several more hours. "We therefore had a choice: to wait for what was not a confirmed return by the helos [and] give any snipers more time to set up an ambush for our exit or we could take a chance and exit immediately without any cover," Kerry recorded in his notebook. "We chose the latter."

Just as they moved out onto the Cua Lon, at a junction known for unfriendliness in the past, kaboom! PCF-94 had taken a rocket-propelled grenade round off the port side, fired at them from the far left bank. Kerry felt a piece of hot shrapnel bore into his left leg. With blood running down the deck, the Swift managed to make an otherwise uneventful exit into the Gulf of Thailand, where they rendezvoused with a Coast Guard cutter. The injury Kerry suffered in that action earned his his second Purple Heart.
 
Kerry's boat had been hit by a rocket fired by someone else — the guerrilla in question was still armed with a live B-40 and had only been clipped in the leg; when the guerrilla got up to run, Kerry assumed he was getting into position to launch a rocket and shot him:

On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's boat received word that a swift boat was being ambushed. As Kerry raced to the scene, his boat became another target, as a Viet Cong B-40 rocket blast shattered a window. Kerry could have ordered his crew to hit the enemy and run. But the skipper had a more aggressive reaction in mind. Beach the boat, Kerry ordered, and the craft's bow was quickly rammed upon the shoreline. Out of the bush appeared a teenager in a loin cloth, clutching a grenade launcher.

An enemy was just feet away, holding a weapon with enough firepower to blow up the boat. Kerry's forward gunner, [Tommy] Belodeau, shot and clipped the Viet Cong in the leg. Then Belodeau's gun jammed, according to other crewmates (Belodeau died in 1997). [Michael] Medeiros tried to fire at the Viet Cong, but he couldn't get a shot off.

In an interview, Kerry added a chilling detail.

"This guy could have dispatched us in a second, but for . . . I'll never be able to explain, we were literally face to face, he with his B-40 rocket and us in our boat, and he didn't pull the trigger. I would not be here today talking to you if he had," Kerry recalled. "And Tommy clipped him, and he started going [down.] I thought it was over."

Instead, the guerrilla got up and started running. "We've got to get him, make sure he doesn't get behind the hut, and then we're in trouble," Kerry recalled.

So Kerry shot and killed the guerrilla. "I don't have a second's question about that, nor does anybody who was with me," he said. "He was running away with a live B-40, and, I thought, poised to turn around and fire it." Asked whether that meant Kerry shot the guerrilla in the back, Kerry said, "No, absolutely not. He was hurt, other guys were shooting from back, side, back. There is no, there is not a scintilla of question in any person's mind who was there [that] this guy was dangerous, he was a combatant, he had an armed weapon."
Another member of the crew confirmed Kerry's account for the Boston Globe and expressed no doubt that Kerry's action had saved both the boat and its crew:

The crewman with the best view of the action was Frederic Short, the man in the tub operating the twin guns. Short had not talked to Kerry for 34 years, until after he was recently contacted by a Globe reporter. Kerry said he had "totally forgotten" Short was on board that day.

Short had joined Kerry's crew just two weeks earlier, as a last-minute replacement, and he was as green as the Arkansas grass of his home. He said he didn't realize that he should have carried an M-16 rifle, figuring the tub's machine guns would be enough. But as Kerry stood face to face with the guerrilla carrying the rocket, Short realized his predicament. With the boat beached and the bow tilted up, a guard rail prevented him from taking aim at the enemy. For a terrifying moment, the guerrilla looked straight at Short with the rocket.

Short believes the guerrilla didn't fire because he was too close and needed to be a suitable distance to hit the boat squarely and avoid ricochet debris. Short tried to protect his skipper.

"I laid in fire with the twin .50s, and he got behind a hootch," recalled Short. "I laid 50 rounds in there, and Mr. Kerry went in. Rounds were coming everywhere. We were getting fire from both sides of the river. It was a canal. We were receiving fire from the opposite bank, also, and there was no way I could bring my guns to bear on that."

Short said there is "no doubt" that Kerry saved the boat and crew. "That was a him-or-us thing, that was a loaded weapon with a shape charge on it . . . It could pierce a tank. I wouldn't have been here talking to you. I probably prayed more up that creek than a Southern Baptist church does in a month."

Charles Gibson, who served on Kerry's boat that day because he was on a one-week indoctrination course, said Kerry's action was dangerous but necessary. "Every day you wake up and say, 'How the hell did we get out of that alive?'" Gibson said. "Kerry was a good leader. He knew what he was doing."
Although Kerry's superiors were somewhat concerned about the issue of his leaving his boat unattended, they nonetheless found his actions courageous and worthy of commendation:

When Kerry returned to his base, his commanding officer, George Elliott, raised an issue with Kerry: the fine line between whether the action merited a medal or a court-martial.

"When [Kerry] came back from the well-publicized action where he beached his boat in middle of ambush and chased a VC around a hootch and ended his life, when [Kerry] came back and I heard his debrief, I said, 'John, I don't know whether you should be court-martialed or given a medal, court-martialed for leaving your ship, your post,'" Elliott recalled in an interview.

"But I ended up writing it up for a Silver Star, which is well deserved, and I have no regrets or second thoughts at all about that," Elliott said. A Silver Star, which the Navy said is its fifth-highest medal, commends distinctive gallantry in action.

Asked why he had raised the issue of a court-martial, Elliott said he did so "half tongue-in-cheek, because there was never any question I wanted him to realize I didn't want him to leave his boat unattended. That was in context of big-ship Navy — my background. A C.O. [commanding officer] never leaves his ship in battle or anything else. I realize this, first of all, it was pretty courageous to turn into an ambush even though you usually find no more than two or three people there. On the other hand, on an operation some time later, down on the very tip of the peninsula, we had lost one boat and several men in a big operation, and they were hit by a lot more than two or three people."

Elliott stressed that he never questioned Kerry's decision to kill the Viet Cong, and he appeared in Boston at Kerry's side during the 1996 Senate race to back up that aspect of Kerry's action.

"I don't think they were exactly ready to court-martial him," said Wade Sanders, who commanded a swift boat that sometimes accompanied Kerry's vessel, and who later became deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. "I can only say from the certainty borne of experience that there must have been some rumbling about, 'What are we going to do with this guy, he turned his boat,' and I can hear the words, 'He endangered his crew.' But from our position, the tactic to take is whatever action is best designed to eliminate the enemy threat, which is what he did."

Indeed, the Silver Star citation makes clear that Kerry's performance on that day was both extraordinary and risky. "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets," the citation says, Kerry "again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only 10 feet from the Viet Cong rocket position and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy . . . The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lt. Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."
 
Kerry was injured yet again on 13 March 1969, in an action for which he was awarded both a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. According to Kerry's Bronze Star citation (signed by Admiral Zumwalt himself):

Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry was serving as an Officer-in-Charge of Inshore Patrol Craft 94, one of five boats conducting a Sealords operation in the Bay Hap River. While exiting the river, a mine detonated under another Inshore Patrol Craft and almost simultaneously, another mine detonated wounding Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry in the right arm. In addition, all units began receiving small arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks. When Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry discovered he had a man overboard, he returned upriver to assist. The man in the water was receiving sniper fire from both banks. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry then directed his boat to return to and assist the other damaged boat to safety. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry's calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
 
I am not impressed with {frankenstein] "kerry", yes i have many issues with GW Bush, but this idiot sounds like a dumbass when he speaks, all he can say is get rid of bush over and over, but he never gives the hardcore reasons why, and states what he is going to do to "fix" the problems he doesn`t address, HE scary kerry SUCKS! IMO.
 
Didn't Kerry only serve 4 months incountry? From what I understand, at least one or two of his wounds were fairly inconsequential, and most guys wouldn't have even counted them for Purple Hearts. Kerry, having a political future in mind and wanting to emulate the "other JFK", made sure he was put in for everything possible. And, after his third heart, he exercised the legal loophole of requesting to be assigned to safer duty.

Don't get me wrong - he did what he had to do and showed courage. But no more than thousands of other men there.
 
E. G.,

Answer my questions on the snowmobile thread and I'll respond to your comments here.

Paul
 
EG, it's Megadeth, not Metallica. You don't want Dave Mustaine on your case for that slip ;) :D And I have never been on the wrong side.
elkgrin.gif



I respect Kerry's war record. But that alone doesn't do it for me. It never has and it never will no matter who the candidate is. John McCain would not make a good president because of his war record either.

WSJ reprint - On Feb. 27, 1992 he attacked Bob Kerrey for making an issue of Bill Clinton's lack of military service, yet he (and Gunner) present his own heroics in that war as a qualification for the presidency. Kerry Hopes War Record Attracts Vets

Answer me this:
Why did Kerry vote against being a signatory to the Kyoto Treaty (correctly I might add), then criticize GW for withdrawing from the treaty?

And this:
Why did he vote against the Iraq war in 1991, recently citing his memories of Vietnam as the reason, when the reasons in 1991 had to do with economic sanctions? And in 1998, he argued strenuously FOR action, with or without allies.

I'm not criticizing his record here, just his flip-flopping. How about explaining this:
He claims to CNN's Judy Woodruff Feb 19 he never accused American servicemen of war crimes when in April, 1971 his testimony before the Senate Relations Committee says otherwise ( Scan of testimony , see page 3), or admit on the Dick Cavett show June 30, 1971 "I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty. But we are not trying to find war criminals. That is not our purpose. It never has been."

A song by Henry Rollins comes to mind...


And:
Why did he say in 2003 he supports the Cuban embargo, when in 2000 he said a reevaluation of the embargo is way overdue?

And the Patriot Act? (for it, now against it)

And the death penalty for terrorists? (against it, now for it)

Why did he vote in favor of completing the Iraq War in 2003, and then voted against authorizing $87 billion to pay for it?

Middle East affairs
October 2003 speech to the Arab American Institute in Michigan:
"I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the Israeli government's decision to build the barrier off of the Green Line--cutting deep into Palestinian areas. We don't need another barrier to peace. Provocative and counterproductive measures only harm Israelis' security over the long term, increase the hardships to the Palestinian people, and make the process of negotiating an eventual settlement that much harder."
Quoted in the Jerusalem Post, a week before the primary in New York:
"Israel's security fence is a legitimate act of self defense. No nation can stand by while its children are blown up at pizza parlors and on buses. While President Bush is rightly discussing with Israel the exact route of the fence to minimize the hardship it causes innocent Palestinians, Israel has a right and a duty to defend its citizens. The fence only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel."
From the Washington Post
Kerry accused the White House of allowing "foreign countries to engage in unfair trading practices." yet in the Senate, Kerry voted for Bush's trade agreement with Chile and Singapore that some Democrats complained did not mandate tough enough labor and environment standards.


Originally posted by BHR:
E. G.,

Answer my questions on the snowmobile thread and I'll respond to your comments here.

Paul
LMFAO!!!

And thanks for the "young man" reference. I like being "only" 38 ;)


For me, I'm not making up my mind until November.
 
Oopps Hangar!

Your dang near as old as me. Why did I think you were a young twenty something? Must have been the music. Oh well, you got a good head on your shoulders no matter what your age. Keep it up and keep E. G. honest!

Paul
 
Just found some more. Pay particular attention to the last paragraph.

Two wars, two Kerrys
Thirteen years ago, Walter Carter, of Newton, Mass., wrote to his senator and asked him to support military action to expel Saddam Hussein's troops from Iraq. As a vote neared, Carter faxed his letter to the office of John Kerry and, just to be sure, sent it along by regular mail as well.

A few days later, Kerry wrote back to thank Carter for opposing military action against Iraq and told him he had voted "no" on the resolution to give then-President George H.W. Bush the go-ahead.

"I didn't know what to think," Carter recalls today.

A few days later, Carter got another letter from Kerry. The Senator thanked Carter for supporting Bush on Iraq.

"From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf," Kerry wrote.

"As I recall they said it was a computer glitch," Carter said. "Possibly it's true. Possibly it's not true. I don't know what to believe."

And therein lies one of the mysteries of John Kerry, a man inclined to split irreconcilable differences, leaving voters confused and Republicans ready to pull out the blunt instrument of his own record and beat him with it.

Kerry's innate sense of triangulation is so widely recognized that President Bush, in the opener to his campaign, simply reeled off a list of contradictions.

"The other party's nomination battle is still playing out," Bush said. "The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions: for tax cuts and against them; for Nafta and against Nafta; for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act; in favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it.

"And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

For Gulf War II, Kerry kept his correspondence in order and voted to authorize armed force, this time layering on so many caveats that, when he changed his mind, he had ample escape tunnels dug. In a debate, he answered a question about whether he felt responsibility for those young men and women dying in Iraq with a statement that veers from one corner to another then finally ascending to midair where it hovers in permanent incoherence.

The candidate who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement now sounds like both senators Smoot and Hawley as he tours industrial states.

"How about some fair trade," he demands.

He helped write the Patriot Act and now explains: "The only thing wrong with the Patriot Act is John Ashcroft." It is as if a man who has written bad law is angry that someone bothers to enforce it.

This betwixt and between existence comes not from innate hypocrisy but from the abundance of caution that transforms honest men into hypocrites. Kerry's heroism in Vietnam, and his later heroism in working to end the war, once spoke to his best side. Absent agreement, he would persuade.

Ted Kennedy, Kerry's senior colleague in the Senate, spoke to me about how Kerry pushed endlessly to normalize relations with the nation whose guerrilla warriors worked so hard to kill him 40 years ago.

"There was no political gain to it," Kennedy said. Kerry pushed to normalize relations with Vietnam because it was the right thing to do.

What happens to men once they have offices to protect -- or, in Kerry's case, an office to gain -- is that they suddenly aim for the great, vast middle where their mistakes can be lost amid the crowd of others. Thus, Kerry was expected to lead Democratic opposition to the latest Iraq war but voted, instead, to approve it. Now he says he only approved it as a last resort.

Kerry's straddle, both now and back then, is likely to make him an easy target for Republican operatives who should not be given such an easy time when their own leader has yet to account for the Iraq mess.

Instead, the Republicans will simply wave Kerry's Senate vote on the current Iraq war every time he criticizes the current mess. He will equivocate so hard the room will shake and votes fall away like loose roof tiles.

How well will it work?

Consider the treatment he was handed when the two contradictory letters to Walter Carter surfaced a decade earlier.

I remember it because it happened at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner of the Allegheny County Republican Party, March 20, 1991, at the William Penn Hotel.

At the time the first George Bush was still flush with victory in the Persian Gulf, and dinnergoers chortled over a videotaped presentation of assorted senate Democrats backpedaling in the wake of a war they'd opposed. Ted Kennedy was shown. News clips were shown. But for Kerry, the speaker simply read the two letters, to everyone's amazement.

"It's like those before-and-after pictures they print in the papers," the speaker said. "If they didn't tell you so themselves, you'd think they were different people."

Kerry has to remember that one. The speaker was Sen. John Heinz. Two weeks later, he would die in a plane crash. Four years after that, Kerry would marry his widow -- a woman who speaks directly and without equivocation and doesn't need two sets of letters to make her mind known.

He might want to ask her for a copy of the speech.
 
Cali,

Yes, Kerry had courage to show in Viet Nam, just like 1000's of others. And Bush didn't have the courage to show, just like 1000s of others who went to Canada, Oxford, or checked the "Do not volunteer for overseas duty" on their Guard application. :rolleyes:

Damn Paul, you are Old. Now I understand why you get so nervous and uptight when somebody has a differing opinion. You have got to that point in life when you can't objectively look at new ideas, so you just dismiss them as wrong.

I hope I don't get like that when I am your age.
 
I think I will make this space my dedication to John Kerry for the next eight months.

"I Was Misled"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/03/EDGVG5CFUG1.DTL

Kerry's complicated exfoliation

Debra J. Saunders
Wednesday, March 3, 2004

IT'S AN ODD campaign gimmick, but Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., often tells voters that he was "misled" and that's why he voted for an October 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq.

Kerry says he believed the resolution tied President Bush to promises to build an international coalition, to work with the United Nations and only go to war as a last resort. A disappointed Kerry now says Bush failed in all three venues.

Kerry's story only works if you don't know that the resolution didn't bind Bush as Kerry said.

A month before Kerry's "yes'' vote, Bush went to the United Nations and said the following: "Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice -- 16 times he has defied the U. N. The U.N. has told him after the (Persian) Gulf War what to do, what the world expected, and 16 times he's defied it. And enough is enough. The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that's what we're about to find out.''

When Kerry met with The Chronicle Editorial Board on Friday, I had the chance to ask the senator how he could have expected Bush to behave differently in light of what Bush had said.

Kerry's answer reminds me of the angry customer in the Federal Express ad, who, clad only in a towel and a loofah mitt, calls a company to complain that FedEx delivered his package as scheduled, which he should not have expected, and by the way it inconveniently interrupted a "complicated exfoliation."

Kerry's answer was that Washington insiders believed that Bush didn't mean what he said. "I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn't made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That's what a lot of people thought."

What about what Bush said to the U.N.? That was "rhetorical," Kerry answered. And "a whole bunch of very smart legitimate people" not running for president thought as he did. "So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck." Kerry continued, "The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us."

So Kerry was "misled" because he believed that Bush didn't mean what Bush said.

Talk about your dirty tricks . . .

Kerry also downplayed the importance of his Iraq vote when he told The Chronicle, "Moreover, we didn't give (Bush) any authority he didn't have. (President) Clinton went to Kosovo without Congress. Clinton went to Haiti without Congress."

And: "What we thought we were doing was getting him (Bush) to a place where it would be harder to go to war."

The scariest part is that Kerry looked as if he believed what he said. He had noted that all of his fears of where Bush might err turned out to be right. At the same time, Kerry asserted that his vote for military force made it "harder" for Bush to go to war.

There are a few ways to interpret Kerry's statement.

One is to believe the Kerry spin that the Vietnam War vet is a reluctant warrior, who only sends other mens' sons off to war under the most dire circumstances, and Kerry somehow believed that a Senate vote authorizing force would make it harder for Bush to send U.S. troops to Iraq.

Or you can believe Kerry is a reluctant warrior who voted for war, even if he opposed it, because he was running for president, and the war polled well.

Or you can believe that Kerry strongly believed in the war, but now poses as a reluctant warrior because he is running for president as a Democrat.

Or you can believe that you shouldn't believe a politician who complains he was misled because another politician had the cheek to mean what he said.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders at [email protected].
 
Here's a fun topic: Just what is it about military service that qualifies one for the Presidency? Or, to make it easier, what is it about Kerry's service that qualifies him for the office? Did he learn leadership skills that he otherwise wouldn't have, and that will make him a better president? Did he prove through his courage in combat to be somehow more qualified to sit the Oval Office?

No grumpy "love veterans or else" remarks, please! This is not a pissing match. I'm asking for honest opinions and thoughts from both sides of the argument. What does Kerry's (or Bush's) military service have to do with his ability to be President?
 
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