JK had a chance to talk with Larry King last night on CNN. He addressed some of the issues that have us all shaking our heads the last few days. He reminded us that he’s been saying the same thing about a plan that will really work in Iraq for 3 years now.

Larry started with a question about the Iraqi prime minister who just a short time earlier had cancelled his first summit meeting with Bush. JK responded:

KERRY: I think that all of the politicians in Iraq are using the American presence as an excuse, Larry, not to take on the responsibility they need to, which is why I have said for three years now that this is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and particularly within the last year that we need to be clearer about a date by which they will assume the responsibility.

In the absence of a date, they have an excuse to simply continue to dawdle and procrastinate as long as they want. I don’t think one young American soldier ought to be killed because Iraqi politicians are unwilling to compromise in order to assume responsibility for their own country.

There’s more plain speaking where that came from and you can read the transcript or watch it.

Want to see more?

Look for JK on the following shows today:

--  Interview with Rita Cosby - live on MSNBC tomorrow afternoon with Rita Cosby sometime between 12:45 - 1:05 pm.

--  The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer — CNN (airs at 4 pm and 7 pm EST)

--  Interview with Alan Colmes on Hannity and Colmes - Fox News (airs at 9 pm EST)

Come back and tell us what happened.

Update:  Transcripts and videos now available

Interview with Rita Cosby – transcript – video

Interview with Wolf Blitzer – transcript – video

Interview with Alan Colmes – transcript – video

 

Road Report from Jose Toirac and Danielle Forsythe

[Editor’s Note: Two of our web team members were in the Boston area yesterday and filed this report on Ted’s behalf.]

Tonight we fought our way through Boston traffic and went to the John Kerry Holiday Reception at the U.S. Presidential Museum in Worcester, MA. At the reception we filled in for Ted, the roving JK photographer / videographer.

The crowd at the event was impressive. Many local politicians and Democratic Supporters attended the holiday event and cheered John Kerry as he spoke about the Democratic victory in 2006. JK spoke about the work that the Democratic party needs to get done in Congress and outlined some of his plans for the future including the work he plans on doing in the Senate this coming year. After he spoke, JK walked through the crowd taking pictures and thanking everyone personally for their hard work in 2006.

Enjoy the pictures and check out these video interviews at the party with Doug Balder and Corey Costa. [These links are quicktime movies; we’ll update the links when the flash version is available.]

Mahalo

<!-more->

 

JK blogger KarynNJ was talking about seeing Joe Scarborough on MSNBC yesterday. She said “Scarborough, very upset about the Iraqi civil war, was saying that there was no mission there for our men – Lawrence O’Donnell was agreeing. Scarborough then said that he rarely called John Kerry prescient, but the comment that has been going through his head was the question Kerry asked in 1971 at the end of his testimony. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” It was unusual as he was very very emotional.”

She then said that she had written a letter to Joe and she shared it. KarynNJ touched on some points that are so often overlooked, in a simple yet powerful manner. We’d like to share it with all of you. <!-more->

Dear Mr. Scarborough,

I was surprised to hear you very emotionally reference John Kerry’s famous question from his 1971 Senate testimony. For many people, the truth that Vietnam in 1971 was as hopeless (though less dangerous to the world as a whole) as Iraq was distorted by a resurgence of the idea that Vietnam could have been won. This view that America could have won if popular support had remained behind the Vietnam War has been used against Senator Kerry for decades.

Senator Kerry’s perfectly formulated 1971 question which takes war to its very heart – the individual soldier who might die – was in stark contrast to all other political speech I have heard. Kerry went on to say that every day someone had to lose his life because politicians were unwilling to admit what the whole world already knew. In recent years, Robert MacNamara in “Fog of War” admits that he knew the war couldn’t be won as early as 1968. Senator Kerry has said in speeches in and out of the Senate that half the men whose names are on the Vietnam War Wall died after that time.

It seems that at this point you and many other commentators have reached the point Senator Kerry reached in April of this year, when he spoke out against allowing soldiers to die rather than admitting the policy in Iraq was wrong. You might want to see a video of a speech he gave in Boston on April 22, 2006 – the 35th anniversary of his Senate testimony. The speech is called “Dissent” If the link doesn’t work, it is on his web site, johnkerry.com, under multimedia.

Last summer, it was Senator Kerry and a few others who placed the lives of soldiers over the political calendar unlike the centrist triangulators. The Republicans were following Bush in a lock step formation on Iraq. The Centrists in the Democratic party clearly did not want Iraq debated in the Senate. I am fully convinced having been at the Boston speech on April 22, 2006, that Senator Kerry in proposing his Kerry/Feingold amendment was one of the few politicians motivated by the seriousness of the situation and the lives of the soldiers rather than politics. He knew the result of speaking the truth in 1971. He knew that Americans prefer to follow those who deceive them saying that we can win rather than honor those who admit that we can’t. Those 2 views, 35 years apart, are the real story of supporting the troops. No fumbled joke, though it hurts politically, can take that away.

A few weeks ago, you among others spent a huge amount of time making a mountain out of a mole hill when you treated Senator Kerry’s botched joke as an important event. The man left out a pronoun “us” in a joke written for him. For political points, you gave this more weight than you have all of Senator Kerry’s serious proposals on Iraq (notably Kerry/Feingold and “the path forward” explained at Georgetown University in October 2005) and all his work in support of veterans rights and benefits. As a former Congressman, I assume you can look things up in the Congressional Record better than I can. An uncharacteristically soft spoken Senator Kerry I saw on CSPAN begging Republican Senators to accept a provision that would allow widows to remain in military housing for a longer time after the death of their spouse because it would make a traumatic time more manageable, characterizes to me someone who genuinely cares for the troops as people— unlike all the people, of either party, who use the troops as props. Senator Kerry was and is a far better person than most of those who have disparaged him for decades. He is the rare politician who is honest and not corrupt.

Sincerely,

KarynNJ

 

More than a year ago, John Kerry spoke at Georgetown University in a speech on October 26, 2005 that covered the US role in Iraq, national security and how the US addresses terrorism:

mistakes of the past, no matter who made them, are no justification for marching ahead into a future of miscalculations and misjudgments and the loss of American lives with no end in sight. We each have a responsibility, to our country and our conscience, to be honest about where we should go from here. It is time for those of us who believe in a better course to say so plainly and unequivocally.

[...]

The path forward will not be easy. The administration’s incompetence and unwillingness to listen has made the task that much harder, and reduced what we can expect to accomplish. But there is a way forward that gives us the best chance both to salvage a difficult situation in Iraq, and to save American and Iraqi lives. With so much at stake, we must follow it.

We must begin by acknowledging that our options in Iraq today are not what they should be, or could have been.

[...]

The way forward in Iraq is not to pull out precipitously or merely promise to stay “as long as it takes.” To undermine the insurgency, we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks. [...]

But history shows that guns alone do not end an insurgency. The real struggle in Iraq – Sunni versus Shiia – will only be settled by a political solution, and no political solution can be achieved when the antagonists can rely on the indefinite large scale presence of occupying American combat troops.

In fact, because we failed to take advantage of the momentum of our military victory, because we failed to deliver services and let Iraqis choose their leaders early on, our military presence in vast and visible numbers has become part of the problem, not the solution.

And our generals understand this. General George Casey, our top military commander in Iraq, recently told Congress that our large military presence “feeds the notion of occupation” and “extends the amount of time that it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant.” And Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, breaking a thirty year silence, writes, ‘’Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.” No wonder the Sovereignty Committee of the Iraqi Parliament is already asking for a timetable for withdrawal of our troops; without this, Iraqis believe Iraq will never be its own country.

We must move aggressively to reduce popular support for the insurgency fed by the perception of American occupation. An open-ended declaration to stay ‘as long as it takes’ lets Iraqi factions maneuver for their own political advantage by making us stay as long as they want, and it becomes an excuse for billions of American tax dollars to be sent to Iraq and siphoned off into the coffers of cronyism and corruption.

<!-more->   This fall, in a September 9, 2006 speech at Faneuil Hall, JK noted:

This is the reality of the world today - a world more dangerous because of the Bush blunders and a challenge far more complicated than the gruff Cheney sound bites. America deserves - our safety depends—on a winning strategy to reverse this dangerous course and make our country more secure.

There are five principal priorities that demand immediate action: (1) redeploy from Iraq, (2) re-commit to Afghanistan, (3) reduce our dependence on foreign oil, (4) reinforce our homeland defense, and (5) restore America’s moral leadership in the world. These “5 R’s”-if you want to call them that- are bold steps Democrats will take to strengthen our national security, and that the Republicans who have set the agenda today resist to our national peril.

We must refocus our military efforts from the failed occupation of Iraq to what we should have been doing all along: tracking down and killing members of al Qaeda and their clones wherever they are. We must redeploy troops from Iraq—maintain enough residual force to complete the training and deter foreign intervention, so we can free up resources to fight the global war on terror.

Republicans want to wrap this strategy in slogans because they’re afraid to debate what it really is: a redeploy-to-succeed strategy—to succeed in defeating world wide terror, and to succeed in making Iraqis themselves responsible for Iraq.

[...]

We also desperately need something else this administration disdains: diplomacy. Real diplomacy—a Dayton-like summit of Iraq and the countries bordering it, the Arab League, NATO, and the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council. Our own generals have said Iraq can not be solved militarily. Only through negotiation and diplomacy can you stem the growing civil war, and only by setting a deadline to get out can we force Iraq and its neighbors to take diplomacy seriously.

 

John Kerry has been laying out a framework for how to end U.S. involvement in Iraq for more than a year. The president and the Congress should have followed his advice long ago. Instead, day after day, we wake up to headlines like this week’s litany of pain, destruction and death.  

Death Toll For Iraqis Reaches New High; 3,709 Civilians Killed In October, U.N. Says, 11-23-2006, Washington Post

Sectarian Attack Is Worst in Baghdad Since Invasion, 11-23-2006, New York Times

Assault on Iraqi Civilians Is Deadliest Since 2003, 11-24-2006, Washington Post

Iraq Toll Rises; Shiite Militia Retaliates, 11-24-2006, New York Times

In Iraq, Reprisals Embolden Militias; Shiites Attack Sunni Mosques to Avenge Mass Killings; Lawmakers Threaten Boycott, 11-25-2006, Washington Post

Militants Attack Sunnis’ Mosques in 2 Iraqi Cities, 11-25-2006, New York Times

Tim Tagaris handed out some kudos in a post on dailykos about the Lamont campaign including this about JK:

John Kerry

One of two rock stars for the campaign. He refused to endorse Joe Lieberman in the primary. He basically made a mockery of Joe by saying he doesn’t get involved in contested primaries despite campaigning for Jim Webb against Harris Miller a few days earlier. After we won, he sent out a pair of mildly successful fundraising emails on our behalf. He appeared in the state.

Most importantly, John Kerry was the Senator who spoke most forcefully and publicly about Joe’s support of “stay the course” and his Nixonian deception when Joe all of a sudden became a peace candidate in the closing weeks.

Senator Kerry was by far and away the most helpful senator to the campaign.

<!-more-> Mark Barrett at The Premise commenting on the flurry of reports after JK’s appearance on Fox News Sunday:

Not surprisingly there have been a lot of people trying to take John Kerry down and drive him from the roster of prospective presidential candidates over the past couple of weeks. I haven’t commented on that much because it’s normal. It was inevitable in 2003 when Mr. Kerry decided to campaign for president, and it’s inevitable now.

John Kerry is the only politician considering a run in 2008 who scares everyone from Hillary Clinton to John McCain, because he’s actually qualified to be president. He knows it, they know it, and the voters know it.

Everyone else wants to have a personality contest, but if John Kerry runs they can’t. They’ll have to campaign on the merits, and they can’t beat John Kerry on the merits.

Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily had an excellent post highlighting JK’s recommendations in health care,

Kerry Was On To Something and the Big Three Automakers Get It

Last week when the Big Three automakers paid a call on George W Bush they wanted to talk about the woes of the auto industry. “Among their complaints,” Scott Lehigh notes in the Boston Globe, “The heavy healthcare costs they shoulder are hindering their ability to compete.” Their idea for a solution didn’t interest Bush much, but Lehigh suggests, “Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should sit up and take notice.” Indeed they should…

And what did they suggest by way of a solution? Something John Kerry proposed during his presidential campaign: a reinsurance arrangement to pay for chronic or catastrophic healthcare costs, thereby effectively taking those cases out of private health-insurance plans.

[...] In his 2004 campaign, Kerry called for having the federal government pay three-quarters of the additional expenses for patients whose healthcare costs exceed $50,000 a year, provided savings from that cost relief helped reduce employee health-insurance premiums.

Removing those costs from private plans could have big effects. Although they constitute less than 1 percent of all cases, catastrophic care accounts for 20 to 30 percent of healthcare expenses.

If the government were to pick up most of the bill for catastrophic care, health-insurance premiums wouldn’t be under such constant pressure. According to some estimates, premiums would be 10 percent lower than if private plans continued to pay for such care.

Now, Kerry’s political stock isn’t exactly soaring. But at a time when some on the left see a politically unattainable single-payer system as the only true solution to the nation’s healthcare problems, and some on the right insist that impractical, unproven health savings accounts are the proper prescription, the senator’s concept represents pragmatic middle ground.

The interest the notion has evoked from the auto industry demonstrates its appeal to business.

And here, what’s good for General Motors — and Ford and Chrysler — would certainly be good for the country.

[...]

On July 31, John Kerry laid out a plan calling for universal health care coverage by 2012. Putting Kerry’s plan for catastrophic healthcare into play would certainly be a great start to that goal. Lehigh is right on this, the Big Three automakers are right on this. Kerry has been right on this.

And last but not least there’s these 2 related items:

Steve of the Steve Report posted this post-election story which highlights a unique link between JK and a newly won Democratic seat in the House.

The Politics of Exclusion

What can the politics of exclusion teach us about elections? It teaches that the little things can and do matter. For example, in 2004 President Bush held a rally in Mankato, Minnesota, where Tim Walz, a 24-year veteran of the National Guard, and two students were removed due to a John Kerry sticker on one of the students’ wallets. According to Walz, this event turned out to be one of the most important in his decision to run for the House of Representatives. Two years later,Walz defeated 12-year, 6-term Republican incumbent Rep. Gil Gutknecht in the 2006 elections.

On Monday, he [Walz] attended a new-members reception at the White House, where he met President Bush and political adviser Karl Rove, who was convinced Walz would lose. “He said, ‘we had the numbers on you, we thought we had enough, but where did you find the voters?’” Walz said.

The more people you exclude, Karl, the more people who will vote against you, including those who perhaps wouldn’t have voted at all.

A Republican-held seat that wasn’t supposed to be at risk according to this analysis at Blue Stem Prairie.

Felker writes that Walz met White House political director Karl Rove on Monday, and that Bush remembered the rally in Mankato that set Walz on the campaign trail: On Monday, he attended a new-members reception at the White House, where he met President Bush and political adviser Karl Rove, who was convinced Walz would lose. “He said, ‘we had the numbers on you, we thought we had enough, but where did you find the voters?’” Walz said.

Walz noted that President Bush remembered the Mankato rally in 2004 where he and two students were removed due to a John Kerry sticker on one of the students’ wallets. “That was kind of fun,” Walz said of the president’s comment. Walz credits that event as one of the most important in his decision to run for office.

    To the extended Kerry family,

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday — a time to eat too much, watch some football, and most of all relax and reunite with friends and family in the best place I can think of -- our homes.

These past few weeks have reminded all of us of some things we have to be thankful for: friendship, the loyalty of friends and colleagues, the notion that hard work pays off, and that our democracy can work to force a change of direction. I couldn’t be more proud of each and every one of you for the passion and commitment you bring to progressive causes every day.

So be safe, get some rest, enjoy this special time of Thanksgiving, and know that Teresa and I look forward to working side by side with you again after the holidays to help make our country stronger, and to make life better so that next year more and more Americans have more to be thankful for.

        — John

 

Road Report from Ted Chiodo—sort of

Well, this started out to be a road trip for Ted but the gods of aviation did not smile on him yesterday and he was unable to make it to Chesapeake, VA for JK’s appearance there. But we found some people who did make it and can fill in the details for us.

The local paper, The Virginian-Pilot, reported that

...the region’s Democratic leaders turned a roast of Delegate Lionell Spruill Sr. on Monday into a victory celebration.

Surrounded by Rep. Bobby Scott and at least 15 other officeholders at the Holiday Inn Chesapeake, Sen. John Kerry rallied about 475 Democrats, playfully trading barbs with Spruill, but emotionally detailing the Democratic agenda for the next two years.

“We are the new American majority,” Kerry told the crowd to a roaring ovation.

That word – majority – set off a firestorm of applause each time it was mentioned.

Sen. John Kerry tries on a cowboy hat belonging to Esther Vassar, right,
of Newport News. At Monday’s fundraiser in Chesapeake, Kerry said
it was time to pay more attention to jobs and education.
<!-more-> Ted, you’ll be glad to know that we found a couple of other bloggers who covered JK’s appearance and can give us some of the inside scoop for which you’re famous.

Vivian Paige mentioned many of the local Democratic officials that she greeted and then wrote in her blog:

Around 7:15pm, Kerry arrived. Kerry spent about ten minutes moving thru the room, shaking hands and speaking to people. I got a chance to chat with him as well. First impression: golly, that man is tall!

[...]

Kerry took the microphone to thunderous applause. After echoing the story of how he and Spruill met, he spoke briefly about the Democratic agenda for the next two years, touching on such issues as Iraq.

Sean Holihan of VBDems blog had an entertaining report as well:

Last night, Del. Spruill had a dinner in Chesapeake that was anything but your usual, staid political function.

We all knew that Sen. John Kerry was coming, so of course we were excited to be getting this kind of political figure in our neck of the woods. Any time you can get around 500 Democrats together is a good night. What we didn’t know was that the dinner was going to be a roast.

Of course, I won’t repeat everything said last night. However, I will say that Grindly Johnson, Delegate Reverend Dwight Jones and especially Dick Cranwell are a lot funnier then I thought they were. [...]

After the roast was through, Del. Spruill gave a very nice introduction to Sen. John Kerry who tried to keep the lighthearted tone of the night.

The guy did a good job. He told a few funny stories (that didn’t backfire) and went on to talk about Democratic values. It was refreshing to hear him talk about what he and the Master of Ceremonies, Congressman Bobby Scott, truly care about: minimum wage, health care, and taking care of our troops abroad. I wasn’t expecting much from Sen. Kerry and after working all day, I almost didn’t go. I’m glad that I went.

[...]

Anyway, congratulations are in order to Delegate Lionel Spruill and his Legislative Assistant Susan Rowland. An outstanding job by you guys and your staff. It was nice to see someone like John Kerry here in Hampton Roads instead of up in Nova.

  Sounds like a good time was had by all though they did miss out on meeting Ted.

 

On Ted’s behalf,

Mahalo!

 

Keith Olbermann delivered one of his special comments last night. He responded with such clarity to the spectacle of Bush in Vietnam, comparing it to Iraq.

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

And it is pathetic to listen to a man talk unrealistically about Vietnam, who permitted the “Swift-Boating” of not one but two American heroes of that war, in consecutive presidential campaigns.

But most importantly — important beyond measure — his avoidance of reality is going to wind up killing more Americans.

And that is indefensible and fatal.

Olbermann continued:

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

“One lesson is,” he said, “that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”

“We’ll succeed,” the president concluded, “unless we quit.”

If that’s the lesson about Iraq that Mr. Bush sees in Vietnam, then he needs a tutor.

<!-more-> Olbermann went on to enumerate some lessons for Mr. Bush which included:

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask Vietnamese Presidents Diem or Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “domino theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: If the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “peace with honor” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then … Dr. Kissinger.

Wait! The same man who advised Nixon on Vietnam, is advising Mr. Bush now? A man who was responsible for continuining the quagmire of Vietnam while tens of thousands of more American troops died? Who denied there was a problem until pushed into ending the war because of the protest of people all over the country, including the testimony of one young lieutenant before the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971?

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

 

How many times do we have to learn this lesson?  How many lives do we have to spend before it really sinks in?

 

Recent observations on the US position in Iraq

Retired General Barry McCaffrey in The Army Times, November 16, 2006:

McCaffrey predicted that the Army, particularly the National Guard, is on the verge of breaking because the effort is vastly under-resourced and cannot be sustained for long.

“You’ve got a foreign policy, a national security policy in Washington and they’re not resourced to carry it out,” said McCaffrey, who called for an increase of 80,000 soldiers and 25,000 Marines in each service. “The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.

“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”

<!-more->   Retired General William E. Odom in The Capital Times, Madison, WI, November 19, 2006

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president’s conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.

But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can’t be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

The administration could recognize that a rapid withdrawal is the only way to overcome our strategic paralysis, although that appears unlikely. Congress could force a stock-taking. Failing this, the public, sooner or later, will see through all of the White House’s double talk and compel a radical policy change. The price for delay, however, will be more lives lost in vain.

Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly notes, November 20, 2006:

YES, THINGS CAN GET WORSE….After running through all the options available to us in Iraq and acknowledging that they have little chance of succeeding, Suzanne Nossel briefly raises a point that gets nowhere near enough attention:

9. If we don’t begin a planned exit, there’s a good chance we’ll find ourselves in an unplanned one — It’s surprising that by now we haven’t experienced the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the dragging of a corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu a decade later. But it seems likely that that day will come.

Conventional wisdom tacitly assumes that the worst that can happen in Iraq is a continuation of the current low-level civil war, resulting in the loss of thousands of Iraqi lives and dozens of U.S. soldiers each month. But as bad as that is, it’s worth keeping in mind that the American occupation has actually made the Iraqi situation worse every single year since it began, and will probably continue to make things worse as long as we’re there.

John Kerry in a speech given in Faneuil Hall on April 22, 2006:

The War in Vietnam and the War in Iraq are now converging in too many tragic respects.

As in Vietnam, we engaged militarily in Iraq based on official deception.

As in Vietnam, we went into Iraq ostensibly to fight a larger global war under the misperception that the particular theater was just a sideshow, but we soon learned that the particular aspects of the place where we fought mattered more than anything else.

And as in Vietnam, we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go.

We are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first was against Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The second was against terrorists whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here. Now we find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war.

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion. We want democracy in Iraq, but Iraqis must want it as much as we do. Our valiant soldiers can’t bring democracy to Iraq if Iraq’s leaders are unwilling themselves to make the compromises that democracy requires.

As our generals have said, the war cannot be won militarily. It must be won politically. No American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi politicians refuse to resolve their ethnic and political differences.

 

In a speech on April 22, 2006 at Faneuil Hall, John Kerry spoke out against Republican efforts to portray dissent from Bush’s disastrous policies in Iraq as treason. Bush and his allies have mounted this attack over and over since 9/11, attempting to smear and destroy any political opposition to their failed policies.

We’re returning to this speech in light of this weekend’s remarks by Vice President Cheney and Attorney General Gonzales attacking critics of President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional in August. (More details on their attacks appear after Kerry’s remarks.)

Here are a few excerpts from Kerry’s speech last spring (the full text and the video are on the website):

“I have come here today to reaffirm that it was right to dissent in 1971 from a war that was wrong. And to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans today to disagree with a President who is wrong, a policy that is wrong, and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation.

I believed then, just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice, and disserves our people and our principles. When brave patriots suffer and die on the altar of stubborn pride, because of the incompetence and self-deception of mere politicians, then the only patriotic choice is to reclaim the moral authority misused by those entrusted with high office.

<!-more->

The lesson is that true patriots must defend the right of dissent, and hear the voices of dissenters, especially now, when our leaders have committed us to a pre-emptive “war of choice” that does not involve the defense of our people or our territory against aggressors.

The patriotic obligation to speak out becomes even more urgent when politicians refuse to debate their policies or disclose the facts. And even more urgent when they seek, perversely, to use their own military blunders to deflect opposition and answer their own failures with more of the same. Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or votes, or legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives.

-clip-

Dissenters are not always right, but it is always a warning sign when they are accused of unpatriotic sentiments by politicians seeking a safe harbor from debate, from accountability, or from the simple truth.

-clip-

The true defeatists today are not those who call for recognizing the facts on the ground in Iraq. The true defeatists are those who believe America is so weak that it must sacrifice its principles to the pursuit of illusory power.

-clip-

And the most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford.

-clip-

We must insist now that patriotism does not belong to those who defend a President’s position—it belongs to those who defend their country. Patriotism is not love of power; it is love of country. And sometimes loving your country demands you must tell the truth to power. This is one of those times.”

In the speech, Kerry summarizes the history of attacks on dissent from failed foreign adventures, lays out the pernicious tenants of the “Bush-Cheney Doctrine,” and describes the growing similarities between the failure of the war in Vietnam and the failure of Bush’s war in Iraq. Read it.

Cheney Demonizes Dissent at the Federalist Society, November 17, 2006

On Friday, Vice President Cheney spoke to the Federalist Society, the organization that more than any other has nurtured and developed the cadre of law professors and lawyers whom Bush has turned to again and again for his contentious judicial nominations. The following quote comes from the text as posted on the White House website. The White House-supplied indications of “laughter” and “applause” in this official text give a good sense of what members of the Federalist Society find amusing or inspiring:

“Yet none of these considerations was persuasive to a federal district court in the state of Michigan, which ruled three months ago that the NSA program violated the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court found, among other factors, that warrantless surveillance of terrorist-related communications would cause irreparable injury to the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs. (Laughter.) ….

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The district court’s opinion - which The New York Times called “careful and thoroughly grounded” - (Laughter.)—did not distinguish any of those prior federal decisions. Nor, indeed, did the district court even cite those decisions.

The district court also held that the Terrorist Surveillance Program violates the doctrine of separation of powers. We, of course, disagree and expect to prevail on that issue as well. But since we’re on the subject of separation of powers, one conclusion is hard to escape: the Michigan district court’s decision is an indefensible act of judicial overreaching. (Applause.)

As law students and lawyers, of course, all of you understand that a given point of view isn’t necessarily correct, or even persuasive, merely because it’s been handed down by a judge. There’s a reason these things are called opinions. (Laughter.) But the Michigan decision is something altogether different, and it’s very troubling: It is a court order tying the hands of the President of the United States in the conduct of a war. And this is a matter entirely outside the competence of the judiciary. (Applause.)

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And the judicial branch has no business directing national security policy for this country. (Applause.)

Gonzales Says Critics Pose “A Grave Threat”

On Saturday, November 18, 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales picked up the cudgels in a talk to 400 cadets from the Air Force Academy’s political science and law classes. Critics of the warrantless surveillance program were taking a “shortsighted” view, Gonzales said:

“Its [the critics’] definition of freedom - one utterly divorced from civic responsibility - is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people.”