Excerpts from Senator Kerry’s Press Conference today
Posted : September 21, 2004 at 5:45 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
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QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)
KERRY: No, I have one position on Iraq, one position. What they should be confused about is what President Bush has done where he actually says to Americans that if there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to al Qaeda, all of which had been proven to be true, the 9/11 Commission has shown the president wasn’t truthful. His own weapons inspectors have shown the president wasn’t truthful.
And the president says even though that’s true, he would still have taken America to war. Now, I believe there was a better way. And I’ve said that consistently from day one. And I believe the president needs to answer the questions of the American people.
Why are the Iraqi security forces not what they ought to be? Why are they not what they what you said they were, Mr. President? Why are terrorists pouring across the border into Iraq?
Why are our troops facing more terrorists today than they ever were before? And even Secretary Powell has admitted that, that Iraq has become the magnet for terrorists.
Why are our troops without the allies that they need so that they are bearing 90 percent of the costs? This is not the grand alliance the president promised America.
The president wants to shift the topic, and I’m not going to let him shift topic. This is about President Bush and his decisions and his choices and his unwillingness, as I said in my speech yesterday, to live in a world of reality. And American lives are on the line as a consequence of that.
…QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) if the world is better off with Saddam gone, how did that square with the comment last night with David Letterman, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t have gone to war?
KERRY: Because, for several reasons. First of all, it’s obvious, if he is gone, the world is better off without him. Everybody understands that. He’s a brutal dictator. And as I said yesterday in my speech, he deserves his own special place in hell.
But that doesn’t mean that you go to war in an irresponsible way that puts America at greater risk. That doesn’t mean you should take your eye off the ball, which was Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and rush to war just to get rid of him.
Are we better off without him? Sure. But what they’ve done is, as I said in my speech yesterday, they have replaced a dictator with chaos, and chaos in a way that puts America and Iraqis at much greater risk.
I believe there was a more responsible way to do it. If you don’t have weapons of mass destruction, believe me, Saddam Hussein is a very different person. That’s what kept him in power. And I believe Saddam Hussein would not be in power.
This president avoided approaching this in responsible ways, and it’s a tragedy. He now has an opportunity to lead and pull this together, but he seems to be in denial. He doesn’t want to admit what even Prime Minister Allawi admitted yesterday. Terrorists are pouring across the border, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what the prime minister of Iraq said.
And I believe that more than just Americans should be bearing the burden of getting and achieving this success.
…QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE).
KERRY: I’ll tell you why, I’ll tell you exactly why. Because the vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war. But if you read it, and if you think about what it gave the president, it gave the president what he said: America will speak with one voice. Those are the words of the president.
And in Cincinnati, the president said war is not inevitable. In Cincinnati, the president said we will plan carefully, we will go with our allies. He laid out a series of his own standards.
Now, the vote to go to war gave the president judgment, presidential judgment.
It wasn’t a vote to go that day. It was a vote to go through the process of going to the U.N., building the allies and then making a judgment of whether we had to go. The president made his own judgment.
Now, we supported him in that judgment because he was going to war. But the fact is, no one could have imagined back then that they would discard their own state department’s 11 volumes of plan for what to do, that they would not guard the borders, that they would not guard the ammunition dumps, that they would disband the Army, that they would not keep a civil service structure in place, that they would not provide the electricity and provide the jobs and the services.
This has been incompetently handled, mismanaged every step of the way. The people who gave them good advice, as I said in my speech yesterday, they were fired or they retired.
And this president hitched his wagon to the idealogues. And we are paying a price for that today.
I believe there was a better judgment to make. And I said so all along. Every one of you throughout this knows I have said, there was a right way to do this and a wrong way to do it. And the president, every step of the way, has chosen the wrong way.
…QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)
KERRY: That’s exactly what I said throughout that period of time (on a question about his alleged inconsistencies on Iraq). But that’s not the debate. That’s the debate the president wants to have now.
The debate now is whether or not you have a plan to win and whether or not you are facing the realities on the ground in Iraq. Iraq was not the war on terror the day that the president decided to go. The war on terror was al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and Afghanistan. And he took his eye off that ball, transferred troops out from under General Frank, even before he had permission of the Congress, and began to do the build-up for Iraq.
And that has been, as I said yesterday in my speech, an enormous diversion from the war on terror, and it has in fact, in my judgment and the judgment of many, many experts, made America less safe. There are more incidents of terrorism around the world. There are more incidences of terror against our troops in Iraq. There are, as Prime Minister Allawi said, millions — you know — millions — there are people pouring, terrorists pouring over the borders.
The borders are not secure. We don’t have the troops and the people to make them secure. So, our people become at greater risk. I don’t think — I think the president — every single one of those issues were foreseeable, and they were warned, and this president chose not to take the steps to make our troops safer.
…
My favorite line was when he said “..That’s exactly what I said throughout that period of time. But that’s not the debate. That’s the debate the president wants to have now. The debate now is whether or not you have a plan to win and whether or not you’re facing the realities on the ground in Iraq..”
I think you did well Senator Kerry. Wish you would do more of these.
- Anand
Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004