Kerry on Iraq -- no nuance here

Bob Somerby puts it succinctly,

KERRY’S POSITION: I voted to give President Bush the authority. Then President Bush f*cked it up.

Fareed Zakaria agrees, though he puts it a bit more artfully.

The more intelligent question is, given what we knew at the time, was toppling Saddam'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.

[...]

Bush's position is that if Kerry agrees with him that Saddam was a problem, then Kerry agrees with his Iraq policy. Doing something about Iraq meant doing what Bush did. But is that true? Did the United States have to go to war before the weapons inspectors had finished their job? Did it have to junk the United Nations' process? Did it have to invade with insufficient troops to provide order and stability in Iraq? Did it have to occupy a foreign country with no cover of legitimacy from the world community? Did it have to ignore completely the State Department's postwar planning? Did it have to pack the Governing Council with unpopular exiles, disband the Army and engage in radical de-Baathification? Did it have to spend a fraction of the money allocated for Iraqi reconstruction—and have that be mired in charges of corruption and favoritism? Was all this an inevitable consequence of dealing with the problem of Saddam?

Zakaria's answer is no, that, to quote IBM's Lou Gerstner, "strategy is execution." Other nation-building programs over the past decade -- better planned, less ideologically-driven, not managed by blindered neocons and cronies -- have been successful.

Kerry was right to give the president authority to wage war with Iraq (that does not mean he voted for Bush's war). It was the only way we could get the UN to pay attention, force more intrusive inspections, and force Hussein to comply to them. It was also important for a senator hoping to be president himself one day to make sure his future authority to use the nation's force is not circumscribed. But he didn't vote for the bungling ineptitude that Bush's headlong rush to war has led us to.

And his "nuanced" thinking may be the only chance we have of raising our endeavor there out of the chaos -- would quagmire by any other name still smell as rancid? -- in which we find ourselves.