Overview

(This section is intended for people who want brief answers at their fingertips. For more detailed answers backed up by a lot of quotations from Kerry's statements, see the Q&A section and the Video section.)

John Kerry's Position on the War

Before the war, John Kerry kept talking about Saddam being a menace, but he also says he wasn't pushing for war. Can you boil his position down to one sentence?

Sure. John Kerry said for years that we needed to get serious about solving the problem of Saddam, but that there were a lot of ways to get seriously tough with Saddam without launching a hasty, badly-planned, near-singlehanded invasion.

So why did Kerry vote Yes on the authorization of the use of force?

To give President Bush the big stick he needed to get Saddam to back down and accept weapons inspections. A recent editorial in the Seattle Times explains that it was just like a union voting yes on a strike authorization, to put the negotiators in a better bargaining position. Nothing more mysterious than that.

By the way, Kerry spelled out all his expectations -- and the assurances President Bush had given about not rushing to war -- in his statement on the Senate floor on 10/9/02, two days before the vote. This isn't something he made up last week.

So was Kerry voting to bluff?

No. He really did support the use of force if it was necessary, so it was no bluff. But President Bush used force when it wasn't necessary, and he used it very badly (not enough allies, not enough troops, not enough planning, etc.)

How can Kerry vote Yes on the use of force and then criticize President Bush's actions?

Easy. Kerry voted to give Bush authority to use force if needed; that doesn't mean he has to agree with what Bush did with the authority. As someone else put it recently, "Kerry voted to give George Bush the car keys. George Bush crashed the car."

Does Kerry think the president can defend the country without approval from the UN?

Absolutely yes. Kerry has said again and again that the president has the right to take action to defend the country without anyone's permission, and that as president, he would never let the UN or anyone else decide what actions he could take to defend us.

Then why does Kerry criticize Bush for going in without enough allies?

It's a matter of good strategy -- going with a lot of help to reduce the danger to our troops, keep the costs to us low, and maintain good relationships with our friends because we'll surely need their help again in the future. Kerry has also criticized Bush for many other failures of judgment, including rushing to war instead of letting the inspectors finish their work, not equipping the troops properly, etc.

Didn't Kerry want to get Saddam out of power?

Yes, absolutely. He said that over and over. But he wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't create an even bigger problem. He said we should not go to war only for regime change -- that the only reason to go to war would be if there was an imminent threat or if that was the only way to disarm Saddam, after other options had been exhausted. Kerry was in favor of putting pressure on Saddam from the outside and also encouraging opposition forces inside Iraq to squeeze Saddam, not toppling Saddam in such a poorly-planned way that we're left with an even bigger mess. Kerry didn't want us to go from the frying pan to the fire.

We know now that there were no WMDs in Iraq and there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. George Bush says he would have gone to war anyway. Would Kerry have gone to war with Iraq, knowing what we know now?

Absolutely not. He's said again and again that he would not have gone to war, and he's asked how George Bush can possibly be serious when he says that he (Bush) would have gone to war if he had it all to do over again.

So Kerry would have left Saddam in power?

Not necessarily, and not forever. Kerry wanted to use other means to weaken Saddam and finally push him out. He just didn't want to pay the kind of price that we're paying now -- over 1,000 U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded, almost $200 billion spent on the war, etc. And Kerry didn't want to divert resources from dealing with Al Qaeda in order to deal with Iraq. There were smarter ways to deal with Saddam than getting into this war.

Why did Kerry vote No on the first Gulf War? Why not vote Yes in order to bluff that time?

Remember, his vote to authorize the use of force in 2002 wasn't a bluff. He really was willing to use force if it was needed, because he believed that Saddam presented a threat to the security of the U.S. He just doesn't think the use of force was actually needed at the point when President Bush started the war. In 1991, Saddam wasn't threatening the U.S., and Kerry thought there were other ways to get him out of Kuwait.

Why did Kerry say on August 9, 2004 that he would vote the same way all over again (on the use of force) even knowing what he knows now?

Because it was right for him to affirm the president's authority to defend us and to give President Bush the big stick he needed to force Saddam to back down and let the inspectors back in. That was the only way we were going to find out there were no WMDs. Then George Bush took us to war anyway, even though the inspectors were back in Iraq, before they had time to finish their work. Kerry did not say he would have taken us to war in Iraq even knowing there were no WMDs; he has said clearly that he would not have done that. The question was about his vote to give the president authority to handle the situation, nothing more.

By the way, it's rather bizarre that every time Kerry insists that he would not change his vote, George Bush and the GOP say that that proves he's flip-flopping. Only in GOP spin does a steadfast refusal to change your position count as a flip-flop.

The $87 Billion

Why did John Kerry vote against the $87 billion in supplemental funding for the war?

Mostly because President Bush wasn't willing to pay for it up front. Bush loaded it all onto the deficit, where it'll drag down our economy, we'll have to pay much, much more in interest, and middle class taxpayers will carry most of the load. Kerry wanted to roll back just a part of Bush's tax cut for the rich in order to pay for it.

In other words, Kerry wanted to share the load fairly and pay cash up front, and Bush wanted to put the war on a credit card and send us the bill -- with lots of interest.

Why did Kerry say he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it?

It was just a bad choice of words. He meant he voted Yes on one bill that would have paid for the war more fairly, and No on the unfair bill that Bush wanted.

But the troops needed body armor -- how could Kerry vote against it?

Kerry's vote didn't have anything to do with keeping the troops from getting body armor. George Bush had chosen to send the troops out without enough body armor six months earlier -- in March, 2003 --, but now he tries to score political points by saying Kerry's vote in October 2003 somehow threatened to deprive the troops. Kerry knew when he voted No that the bill was going to pass with votes to spare, because senators announce which way they're going to vote in advance; Kerry knew that his taking a stand wouldn't delay the troops' funding by even one day. Meanwhile, George Bush had threatened to veto the bill, so it's ridiculous for Bush to keep talking about how "there's nothing complicated about supporting our troops" when he was perfectly willing to torpedo the whole bill himself.

The Plan for Iraq

What does Kerry want to do about Iraq?

Kerry has outlined a four-step plan to win the peace in Iraq. These are steps that President Bush should take immediately, rather than let the situation continue to deteriorate. Kerry doesn't know what he'll find in Iraq on January 20th, so he focuses on things that President Bush should do now. The four steps are:

• Get assistance from our allies (even if many of our allies don't want to send troops, there are many other ways they can help, but it will take a serious effort at diplomacy to get them on board)
• Get serious about training Iraqi security forces (the number trained so far is far, far lower than the Administration had claimed, and many of those are barely trained)
• Focus on reconstruction efforts that bring tangible results to the Iraqis (the Bush administration has instead focused on cronyism in handing out contracts and has put much of the reconstruction in the hands of civilians with no expertise in this kind of project; this has resulted in widespread unemployment and desperation among Iraqis, making it easier for the insurgents to find recruits)
• Take immediate steps to ensure that credible elections can be held (make a greater effort to get UN assistance and to train Iraqi election monitors)

You can read more about Kerry's plan by reading his speech of 9/20/04 and the PDF Winning the Peace in Iraq, both found at www.johnkerry.com

Isn't George Bush already doing all that? That's what he says.

No, George Bush is only talking about doing all of that. Kerry has been pushing for some of these steps for the last two years. Bush dragged his feet, and is slowly starting to make token efforts, but it's almost all talk and no results. He needs to make a lot of policy and personnel changes in order to have any chance of success and so far, he hasn't been willing to do that.

Why does Kerry think he can get help from allies if Bush can't?

Because Kerry has more credibility than Bush -- Kerry isn't the one who went around insulting our allies in the first place. At this point, many world leaders want to do as little for George Bush as possible, but they aren't anti-U.S., only anti-George Bush. A new president will have a better chance. Also, Kerry is willing to make policy changes to make it more attractive to our allies to help. As Kerry put it, the fact that George Bush can't do something doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Does Kerry think he can just snap his fingers and get our allies to send in troops?

No, he's made it clear that he doesn't expect that our allies have battalions just waiting for orders from a new president. He does think that there are a lot of ways our allies can help, including helping with security, that would reduce the burden on our troops without requiring that they send their own armies into Iraq. He also thinks that there's a lot that can be negotiated once he's president. Obviously, neither he nor foreign leaders can work all this out in public when he's not president yet.

Does Kerry want to pull out of Iraq immediately?

Flip-Flopping?

Because of a marketing campaign. The Republican party has spent millions of dollars on ads and videos to make people think he flip-flopped. They take a few sentences out of context and put them together to make it sound like Kerry changed his position a lot, but if you see what he really said, he wasn't changing his position at all. He kept saying that we needed to deal with Saddam in a serious way but not by rushing to war. The only change is that now he's pointing out that we know there were no WMDs, which makes the rush to war even more of a case of bad judgment on President Bush's part. If Kerry had been president, he would've left the inspectors in and found out there were no WMDs before things got to this point.

In the second half of the video, they switch to showing his criticisms of the war, and tell you that that came from out of nowhere. In fact he'd been saying the same things all along. You can see all the details at http://www.kerryoniraqwar.com/video/index.html -- we have all the clips from the "Flipper" video next to his original statements. See for yourself what he said.

Miscellaneous

What has Kerry said about the possibility of a draft?

When he is president, there will not be a draft.

What has Kerry said about the torture at Abu Ghraib?

He has condemned the abuses and repeatedly called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

Who made this website, and why did you do it?

We're just two individuals who got tired of seeing the GOP distort John Kerry's words in order to confuse people, and also got tired of seeing the mainstream media do little to straighten things out. More often, the media seems content to complain that Kerry's positions are hard to reduce to slogans or sound bites. We thought that a website format would be ideal for presenting people with more information about what Kerry has been saying. Everything on the site has been exhaustively researched, but we are not representatives or official spokespeople for the Kerry/Edwards campaign.

It's true that it's sometimes difficult to reduce Kerry's positions to one sentence, but it's not impossible. And anyway -- when it comes to questions like whether to take our nation to war, risk the lives of our men and women in uniform and risk exposing our country to greater danger than before, don't we want a president who has more to say on the subject than what you can fit on a bumpersticker?

www.kerryoniraqwar.com
Not associated with, funded by or endorsed by Kerry-Edwards 2004