Kerry is Imploding

NBCNEWS Brokaw interviewed John Kerry Thursday evening.

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."

The world did understand why we did what we did. Some of them didn't like it. The allies Kerry wishes were with us (basically only France, Germany, and Russia) would never have gone with us, no matter how many inspectors were in-country in Iraq and no matter what they did or did not find.

Kerry voted for the "threat of force"? No, he voted to authorize the President to decide when force was necessary. Period. If he thought he was authorizing only the threat of force, he is completely incompetent to be Commander in Chief. We - and the UN - had threatened force for 12 years. Threatening anything without the will to back it up is the worst kind of foreign policy. "Peace through strength" or "peace at all costs"...they may be opposites, but at least both are legitimate stands. "Peace through threats" is a ridiculous, dangerous, and completely irresponsible thing for a Presidential candidate to say.

"That is what you have inspectors for", Mr. Kerry? Really? Because, Hans Blix and his UN inspection process had identified (tagged, supposedly) these very weapons you are complaining about in 1995, but decided they were safe enough to leave in Saddam's hands. They didn't destroy them or even move them (which is what we did when we entered Iraq, by the way), they just trusted Saddam (and the Russians, and the Syrians, apparently) to "do the right thing." Perhaps they should have "threatened force" to make their point.

When Kerry says, "Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons" then turns around and says after 12 years of this "process" weapons were laying around and could have been stolen by insurgents, he's making the case FOR THE WAR!

In this same interview, Kerry latches onto the NYTimes fraudulent reporting to accuse President Bush of "not having a plan" and "incompetence". As the press conference at the Pentagon today shows, the military did have a plan, and they executed it. Kerry's claims of incompetence are irresponsible, and come terribly close to the types of claims he made about the military after the Vietnam War.

Additional Reading:
Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot

Urgent Warning on Iraqi Cache Issued in 1995