Jackson Free Press

October 7, 2004

It appears that the single most important issue of this campaign is the war in Iraq. Even as other domestic and security issues are part of the debate, it seems that the American electorate will demand that the president they elect be able to bring a successful and relatively swift conclusion to end of the war in Iraq—somehow.

Perhaps for that reason, it's the most difficult issue to pin the candidates down on. To say that President Bush's approach is "steady as she goes" and Kerry's is "to change the direction" is an oversimplification that would seem to utterly ignore the actual issues and problems on the ground in Iraq. Both candidates have positions that are more nuanced, and both appear to be less than candid on how their approach will solve the problem.

Did They or Didn't They?

In particular, both Bush and Kerry have misrepresented their own positions on the war. President Bush accuses John Kerry of "flip-flopping" on the war, but perhaps his biggest problem is the twisted logic that he has to employ in order to continue to justify having undertaken the invasion of Iraq in the first place. The original emphasis of the Bush administration was on weapons of mass destruction, and the decision to go to war to effect "regime change" was made because they were dissatisfied with Saddam Hussein's compliance with U.N. demands to allow weapons inspectors. Today, Bush more generally asserts that the world is a "safer place" without Saddam Hussein and uses that as justification for the war.

In the first debate between the two candidates, Bush said: "In Iraq, we saw a threat, and we realized that after September the 11th, we must take threats seriously, before they fully materialize. Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell. America and the world are safer for it."

While this assertion on its face may be true, it was not the original justification for the war, nor does it speak to the Bush administration's timing of the war. Indeed, to justify the timing of the war, Bush is forced to employ rather tortured logic, as in this excerpt from the same debate, "Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming. Why should he? He had 16 other resolutions and nothing took place."

What's lost in that argument is the fact that all evidence suggests that Hussein could not disarm because he had no weapons of mass destruction—and may well have complied with earlier resolutions. Hussein can be accused of petulance and rhetoric in the face of U.S. sanctions and saber-rattling—as well as of much harsher charges of being a ruthless dictator for his own people—but by and large the facts undermine Bush's original justification of the war, forcing him to carefully reword it and cast it in a different light—"flip-flopping," one could call it.

So, too, John Kerry has allowed himself to be seen as on both sides of the war issue. However, that impression doesn't come from the places where he is often accused. John Kerry never voted "for the war" as is often asserted by the Bush administration; he voted to authorize giving the president the right to use force in Iraq. He has since criticized the way the president decided to use that force, and has been a consistent critic of the way Bush handled both the inspections in Iraq and launching the war without enough international support and without enough troops.

According to FactCheck.org, recent ads by the Bush administration attacked Kerry for "flip-flopping" on the line "I have always said we may yet even find weapons of mass destruction," which is meant to suggest that his current criticism is harsher than it once was. The actual quote, which was in response to a question of the Fox News Network in December 2003, according to FactCheck.org, is quite a bit more nuanced. The question was, "But isn't it, in a realistic political sense, going to be a much harder case to make to voters when you have that extraordinary mug shot of Saddam Hussein…looking like he's been dragged into a police line-up?"

Kerry's reply:

"Absolutely not, because I voted to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. I knew we had to hold him accountable. There's never been a doubt about that. But I also know that if we had done this with a sufficient number of troops, if we had done this in a globalized way, if we had brought more people to the table, we might have caught Saddam Hussein sooner. We might have had less loss of life. We would be in a stronger position today with respect to what we're doing.

"Look, again, I repeat, Chris, I have always said we may yet even find weapons of mass destruction. I don't know the answer to that. We will still have to do the job of rebuilding Iraq and resolving the problem between Shias and Sunnis and Kurds. There are still difficult steps ahead of us.

"The question that Americans want to know is, what is the best way to proceed? Not what is the most lonely and single-track ideological way to proceed. I believe the best way to proceed is to bring other countries to the table, get some of our troops out of the target, begin to share the burden."

Where Kerry has been disingenuous is in talking about the way the war in Iraq has been funded and how he's voted on the measure. While it's true that he first voted for the $87 billion appropriation in the fall of 2003—he voted for the bill when it had an amendment that would also rescind some of the Bush tax cuts in order to pay for the measure—he also voted against the final bill, one of only 12 senators to do so. He's been criticized by members of his own party as well as Republicans for that vote, which seems to have been done for partisan reasons during the run-up to his primary challenge against Howard Dean, who was rallying many anti-war Democratic and independent voters to his candidacy.

Specifics and Numbers

In the recent debate, Kerry also misrepresented the amount of money that has been spent on the war in Iraq, referring repeatedly to the $200 billion that has been spent. For instance, at one point during the first debate, he said: "And so, today, we are 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost: $200 billion—$200 billion that could have been used for health care, for schools, for construction, for prescription drugs for seniors, and it's in Iraq."

To come up with that number Kerry has to include quite a few projections and budgets for other purposes that include military actions in Afghanistan and security projects in the U.S. According to FactCheck.org, the actual number at the time of the first debate was closer to $120 billion.

Kerry also suggested during the debate that the subways were shut down in New York during the Republican National Convention, due partly to the lack of funding for homeland security. That's simply a mistake or a fabrication—they were running the whole time. And, he said that "weapons of mass destruction" were crossing the border into Iraq everyday: a gaffe that most of the press seem willing to simply correct but assuming Kerry meant to say terrorists were crossing the border. And Kerry suggested that Bush "outsourced" the job of capturing Bin Laden in Tora Bora in Afghanistan, when there is no conclusive evidence that Bin Laden was there, much less "surrounded," according to a CNN fact-check piece. There has been speculation that Bin Laden may have gotten away in that skirmish.

Bush, for his part, seems to have greatly exaggerated the number of Iraqi troops—army, Iraqi national guard and police included—that are at a state of readiness in Iraq. In the debate, he said: "Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. And that's what we're doing. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year. That is the best way."

Again according to FactCheck.org, this number includes quite a few policemen who have as little as three weeks' training; only around 6,500 are soldiers, and 8,000 of the troops are policemen who have received the full eight weeks of training. The remainder of the 95,000 or so is comprised of lesser-trained national guardsman, border patrol and a handful of Iraqi Air Force members. That compares to an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents, according to an ABC News fact-check story.

Bush also exaggerated the success that the world and U.S. have made in toppling Al Qaeda by suggesting that "75 percent" of Al Qaeda leaders had been "brought to justice." There's no public documented support of that number, and it assumes that the original Al Qaeda leaders were not replaced—the truth appears to be that people have stepped up to run Al Qaeda today. According to FactCheck.org, it's estimated that Al Qaeda has "18,000 potential operatives in 60 countries."

Perhaps the greatest spin since the debate ended has been coming from the Bush campaign in an ad that quotes Kerry as having said that U.S. military decisions would have to pass a "global test." Spokespeople for the Bush administration have said they feel Kerry's statement was one of his biggest mistakes.

But the ad is a deliberate mischaracterization. What Kerry said was: "The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control. No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

In the quote Kerry clearly means that the president's judgment to take preemptive action should be based on legitimate standards. He does not suggest that the U.S. should consign its security decisions to foreign powers or bodies.

Where are the Solutions?

Where both candidates were the most vague was in offering a solution to Iraq. Both suggested that additional Iraqis needed to be trained to take command of their own security, with Bush suggesting that 125,000 would be trained by the end of the year and 200,000 by the end of next year. He also pointed to increased help from NATO, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in training Iraqi troops. Bush said, "We've got a plan in place. The plan says there will be elections in January, and there will be. The plan says we'll train Iraqi soldiers so they can do the hard work, and we are." He also said that an Arab summit would be held and that Japan would host a summit.

Kerry said he would train those troops faster, but didn't go into details as to how he would do that. Kerry also said that he would build a better coalition than the Bush administration had, a position that he has stated often, for at least the past 18 months. He relied largely, however, on the suggestion that a "fresh start"—meaning a new president—and a summit of America's allies would comprise a great deal of his strategy. He also suggested that bringing Iraqi interests and other European and Arab nations into the reconstruction process—allowing them to benefit financially from the reconstruction contracts—would help to "have a stake" in fixing Iraq's problems.

Neither candidate has asserted that more troops would be necessary in order to quell continuing violence in Iraq. Kerry, however, does emphasize adding 40,000 new troops to the active-duty Army in order to relieve the National Guard and maintain readiness in other parts of the world; he also emphasizes the need to make the U.S. energy independent in order to free it from Middle Eastern influence.

Mississippi Candidates for U.S. House on the Iraq War
Incumbent Republican Chip Pickering, running virtually unopposed in the 3rd District, is a proponent of the War in Iraq in both his votes and his rhetoric, having voted for the Iraq Resolution in 2002 and subsequent appropriations for the war. In May 2004, Pickering opened his "weekly" column (which he writes about once every four weeks, according to the archive on his web site) with the following paragraph: "Around the world we are fighting terrorists who hate freedom, we are challenging dictators who fear liberty and we are struggling with regimes who deny equality and justice to their own people. We seek to export democracy while protecting our cities and towns and homes here in America." This, it's fair to say, is in keeping with the Bush line on both the war in Iraq and the "War on Terror."

According to his Web site, Pickering's challenger, independent "pro-white" candidate Jim Giles, supports removal of U.S. forces from the Middle East (except the Indian Ocean) and the return of all Americans troops to U.S. soil except in cases where Congress declares war against another state. Giles also calls for the end of military and diplomatic relations with Israel and support for the "right of return" for Palestinians.

In the 2nd District, incumbent Democrat Bennie Thompson voted against the Iraq resolution of 2002 granting the president authority to use force; in 2004, he voted for a resolution that expressed approval for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and praised U.S. troops for valiant service. Thompson has repeatedly expressed support for U.S. troops, and voted for the $78 billion wartime appropriations bill for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thompson's challenger, Republican Clinton B. LeSueur, doesn't offer anything about the Iraq war on his Web site.