The Difference to Me about Kerry and Bush in Iraq

Even though both Kerry and Bush have similar, stay the course positions on the Iraq conflict, I see one major, if subtle difference.

In my opinion, a point will come just after the election when the Iraqis will tell us to leave. I believe Kerry will pack up our shit, and bid them adios. Bush, however, will find an excuse to stay. He can't stand up and say this was all for naught. Kerry, on the other hand, can blame Bush (rightly so) for the mess, and point to Administration statements that we're committed to leave when told to.

I could be wrong on this, but this is how I feel.

We have other countries in the "Axis of Evil" to invade.

It's hard to say for sure, but I don't believe that Kerry would have bungled Iraq as badly as President Bush and his cabal have. I mean whether or not you think it was a good idea to invade (and I don't so much), the way they invaded took a precarious situation and made it much much worse.

Kerry's military experience, I think, might have taught him to be a little less careless with the lives of our troops.

Bryant
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But I think a rational argument can be made that we might have, even without el presidente Bush at the helme, have had to invade eventually anyway. It was at least in the realm of possibility, even with a Democratic president

And I think this is a good wedge point for moderates / conservatives; even if they like the idea of Invading Iraq, it's hard to defend how the Bush administration has gone about doing it.

Bryant

But what Bush means is "It's mine, I ain't leavin'!"

What Kerry means is "We need to get out of there as soon as we can." He's concerned about leaving a mess that causes more deaths, and would like to prevent that. Bush has no concern for the people of IRaq, he just wants the oil and the prestige of being an emperor.

I wonder if Bush watched "Three Kings" and got a rush over hearing his name repeated throughout as a savior, not realising the sarcasm of the comments?

I wish I had your optimism regarding Kerry's position. Unfortunately, the cynic in me takes over WRT this subject all too often.

My biggest fear isn't so much that Kerry really wants to stick around in Iraq for the unforseeable future, as much that he will bow to the kind of pressures that were LBJ's undoing on Vietnam, namely being afraid of being labeled "weak on defense" by the Republicans.

It's the same old trap of "we can't win militarily, and we can't withdraw politically." As Sy Hersh quoted Ehud Barak in his recent article as advising the US: you can't win an occupation, you can only choose the magnitude of your defeat.

LBJ wasn't bowing to political pressure, he was bowing to the credentials of his advisors. He with his little college teaching degree felt outclassed by the ivy league and academy foreign policy adviosors who told him he was out of his league. The release of the WHite House history tapes over the last decade have backed up that LBJ wanted out of Viet Nam, but was bullied into it by advisors he felt inferior to.

Kerry is a different animal. He bows to political pressure, as his pretended move to the middle indicates. But he is not afraid of military credentials. He has them himself. He has won medals for disobeying the orders of his superiors and improvising solutions to deadly situations. As a very young man he stood before Congress, the president, and the world to say what he believed was right, to face them down. That took a type of courage that LBJ would never have understood.

I believe in this guy. He may not be as pacifist as me, he may not withdraw as quickly as I'd like him to, but his heart is much closer to the right place than Bush's.

I've watched him try to sell his opposition to the death penalty. He has said that he opposes it in federal cases, not out of regard for the life of the prisoner, but because life in prison is more harsh than the death penalty. I don't believe him. He's against it because he believes it is wrong, but he can't say that. He finds other ways to sell it. But the bottom line is, he wants to stop it. I think-- I even trust-- that that's his opinion on the war, too.

He signed the Iraqi Resolution to try to limit Bush's power, since Bush was claiming he had the authority to go to war at any time without Congressional or UN approval. That's his method, to avoid symbolic actions in favor of finding solutions. It fails, sometimes, as it did with the IWR. But he signed it believing it was his best way to head off the war, but he never had the power to actually stop the war.

I believe that with the power, he will stop it, and will sell it how he can. You're right, he may let me down, and I may be seeing something that I want to see. But I'm usually a good judge of people. And if I'm wrong, I know he won't be worse than Bush, so I'll live with a little improvement over none at all.

Sorry so long. You know I can't say anything short. :-)

The mess in Iraq does not spiral out of control if Kerry is elected. It is true that he could blame Bush, but most of the electorate is not going to care. I think everybody knows that voters have an extremely short memory.

But why are we going to build the worlds larges embassy and 11 new bases?

Kerry won't accept the unsubstantiated opinions of a few amateurs over the entire intelligence community.

Kerry will appoint a Secretary of Defense who actually knows how to plan a war and an occupation.

Kerry would let the State Department, not the Defense Department, handle any nation building.

Kerry won't tell the rest of the world to fuck off.