| Senator Kerry did not vote for the war in Iraq. He voted to give the current administration the authority to go to war if it was warranted. Bush betrayed the trust of the Congress and the nation by abusing this authority. |
| If you hand your credit card to a friend to go and pick up an item for you at a store, you are authorizing that friend to use your credit card. Even though technically that authorization is unlimited, there is an implied trust between you and your friend that he will use your credit card as you intended, according to your agreement. If your friend irresponsibly runs up a gigantic bill at your expense, he has betrayed your trust.
The Congress (including Senators Kerry and Edwards) voted to give Bush the AUTHORITY to use force. Congress trusted Bush to use it responsibly and as they had proscribed. Bush did not. He acted recklessly, without exhausting every option short of invasion. Had he let the U.N. inspectors finish their job, it would have been revealed that there were never any weapons of mass destruction. If he had been honest with the American people in his 2003 State Of The Union speech he would have acknowledged that there was no reconstituted nuclear weapons program based on aluminum tubes and Nigerian yellowcake. Instead of using the authorization for the use of force intelligently as a lever to coerce Hussein into cooperation with international inspectors, Bush instead used it irresponsibly as an excuse to plunge America into a bloody quagmire in the Middle East. When casting this vote on October 9, 2002, Kerry said this on the Senate floor: "In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitment he made to the American people in recent days to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out." Source: "The Al Franken Show" - Air America Radio - 9/24/04 The assumption was that Bush would use that authority ONLY IF it was justified by an urgent threat and ONLY IF the support of the world community had been secured and ONLY IF a plan to succeed was in place. |
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