Kerry's Right On Iraq

Devastating Fareed Zakaria column in the Washington Post:

We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Is Bush suggesting that despite this knowledge he would still have concluded that Iraq constituted a "grave and gathering threat" that required an immediate, preventive war? Please. Even if Bush had come to this strange conclusion, no one would have listened to him. Without the threat of those weapons, there would have been no case to make to the American people or to world nations.

There were good reasons to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, but it was the threat of those weapons that created the international, legal, strategic and urgent rationale for a war. There were good reasons why intelligence agencies all over the world -- including those of Arab governments -- believed that Hussein had these weapons. But he didn't.

The more intelligent question is (given what we knew at the time): Was toppling Hussein's regime a worthwhile objective? Bush's answer is yes; Howard Dean's is no. Kerry's answer is that it was a worthwhile objective but was disastrously executed. For this "nuance" Kerry has been attacked from both the right and the left. But it happens to be the most defensible position on the subject.

Yeah. That's exactly right, and nicely succinct too. Kerry could learn something about concision from this piece.

I hope this article gets a lot of play (on Hardball?)---because the Bush strategy has been to try to convince people that Kerry's position is incomprehensibly confusing. It's not. The man has trouble articulating it, but take a look at the opposition.

Kerry's still wrong to say that a president should just be given war authority even if it's known that his case for war is faulty; which is not to say that Kerry's vote at the time was wrong, but that he should have the guts to say that he would have voted differently knowing what he knows now. Curiously, that last point seems to be the current Bush attack line.