There's plenty of context in which the title of Matthew Yglesias' post, "Kerry was Right" would make sense, but the example cited by Yglesias is one many of us have been trying to explain to our friends on the right for years. It should be obvious now to voters who were taken in by the media and by Bush and his chubby, soon to be incarcerated friend Karl Rove, that when it comes to the fight against terrorism, Bush was wrong, and continues to be wrong, that John McCain is equally wrong, and that Senator Kerry was right.
While the Bush voters were cheering the flight deck landing and excusing his political blunders, and justifying the deaths of our men and women in uniform and the billions of dollars spent because "We had to get the terrorists." (we haven't), Senator Kerry was explaining that the way to defeat terrorism is through law enforcement and counterterrorism. He should know. He wrote a book on the subject. He investigated Iran-Contra. He shut down BCCI. He prosecuted criminals. He knows what he's talking about.
But instead of electing the person who actually knows something about fighting terrorism, someone convinced folks that they wouldn't want to have a beer with him (again, wrong), so that was that. We got Bushed.
In an April 17, 2004 Meet the Press interview, Senator Kerry said:
I think that I can fight a far more effective war on terror. I will build alliances and cooperation. I will make America safer. But I will use our military when necessary, but it is not primarily a military operation. It's an intelligence gathering, law enforcement, public diplomacy effort, and we're putting far more money into the war on the battlefield than we are into the war of ideas. We need to get it straight.
In February, 2004, in a speech at UCLA, he said:
But the fight requires us to use every tool at our disposal. Not only a strong military – but renewed alliances, vigorous law enforcement, reliable intelligence, and unremitting effort to shut down the flow of terrorist funds.
In September, 2004 in a speech at New York University, he said:
To prevent that from happening, we must call on the totality of America’s strength. Strong alliances, to help us stop the world’s most lethal weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands. A powerful military, transformed to meet the new threats of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And all of America’s power – our diplomacy, our intelligence system, our economic power, the appeal of our values – each of which is critical to making America more secure and preventing a new generation of terrorists from emerging.
He said it throughout the 2004 campaign (watch 34 minutes into the video), and the Bush campaign mocked the strategy with ads intended to mislead and frighten the American people with the support of the majority of the mainstream media, who bought Bush's hype and sold it to the American public.
Five years, over four thousand American deaths and unknown thousands of Iraqi's killed and displaced, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars later, it's clear. Bush was wrong. Kerry was right. Not just about Iraq, but about the larger issue of how to deal with terrorism.
In 2006, conservative George Will agreed that Senator Kerry had the correct approach to fighting terrorism.
[Will] even offers praise for John Kerry, saying he was right to say "that although the war on terror will be 'occasionally military,' it is 'primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world'"
The most recent validation came from the conservative Rand Corporation, whose report concluded:
... that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”
"Even where we found some success against al-Qaida, in Pakistan and Iraq, the military played a background or surrogate role. The bulk of the action was taken by intelligence, police and, in some cases, local forces."
Keith Olbermann covered the story of MSNBC's Countdown.
Video Credit: MSNBC
I'm not sure how much play this story will get in the mainstream media. People don't like to be reminded that they were wrong, and the media pushed Bush's war hard for years. There's hope that they will repent, though, and give this the attention it deserves. Before American voters make the same tragic mistake with more of McSame.
Senator Kerry will give a speech today at the Center for American Progress on "A New Approach to Fighting Terrorism", and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing today on "Defining the Military's Role Toward Foreign Policy". I'd advise folks to listen. He has a habit of being right on these things.
