Debra Saunders:
WHEN SEN. JOHN KERRY, D-Mass., cast his vote in favor of the Senate resolution authorizing military force against Iraq in October 2002, he made his bed. Now the president's political guru, Karl Rove, is preparing to tuck Kerry snuggly inside those sheets.
In Sacramento Friday, Rove laid out the problem with Kerry's position -- or positions -- on Iraq: "If Sen. Kerry now wants to come out and say, 'I looked at the intelligence ... I said (Hussein) was a danger, I said he had weapons of mass destruction. But the president is a liar for saying the same thing.' That's going to be a hard sell to the American people."
I noted that Kerry told The Chronicle in a February editorial board meeting that he would not have voted for the resolution had he known that much of the intelligence upon which Washington relied came from Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi.
Rove responded, "If (Kerry) had doubts, he should have voted no. If he had doubts, he shouldn't have written that wonderful op-ed on Sept. 6, 2002, in the New York Times in which he said it is imperative to go to the Congress and ask for a resolution of support, it is imperative that the president go to the United Nations and secure the backing of the U.N. Security Council. He said it was imperative then that we issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, and that we require immediate and full compliance, and if Hussein doesn't, the United States must be prepared to go in and ... if need be, largely alone remove Saddam Hussein from power."
...
"I think every premonition I had about the downside of this war was proved prescient," Kerry also told The Chronicle, "and it comes out of the experience that I personally had when we lost the consent and legitimacy of our nation in the war that I fought in."
And yet Kerry voted for this war. How can a man so savvy and sophisticated -- so prescient, if he does say so himself -- have been misled by that simpleton Bush?
"Proved prescient," yet "misled."
Now that is nuance.
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