Centerfield

Kerry on the Gulf War (1990-1991)

This post consists of extensive excerpts from pages 254-267 of John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best. I’m presenting it without any editorializing. You can draw your own conclusions.

[Cross-posted on americanfuture.typepad.com]

[Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 1, 1990]

From the outset, Kerry argued for a diplomatic solution. Three weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kerry said he supported President Bush’s swift deployment of troops to the region and the administration’s insistence that Hussein pull out. But he said Hussein should be given more diplomatic wiggle room for withdrawal. “My greatest fear is this issue is too much box and not enough capacity to move out,” Kerry told editors and reporters at the Boston Globe on August 27, 1990. “That line is pointing in a very dangerous direction.”

Instead, Kerry said, the White House should use back channels to Baghdad to signal a willingness to see Iraq’s claim on specific Kuwaiti territory adjudicated in an international forum. He added that the Bush administration should also indicate possible support for new initiatives to settle the Arab-Israeli stalemate over the occupied West Bank. These options, Kerry said, could produce a diplomatic opening for Hussein’s withdrawal. He was worried about “saber rattling” from Washington, but he insisted that Iraq’s nuclear program must be dismantled by “diplomatic, covert, or overt measures.”

(. . .)

In early December, Secretary of State James Baker appeared before Kerry and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For months, Baker had counseled patience, hoping the American military buildup and economic sanctions would force Hussein’s hand. Now the secretary of state said the administration was ratcheting up its response. “We have to face the fact that, four months into this conflict, none of our efforts have yet produced any sign of change in Saddam Hussein,” he said. If Iraq refused to withdraw, Baker told the senators, the United States was prepared to hit the country “suddenly, massively, and decisively.” Kerry responded, “I’m disturbed because you seem to have given up on sanctions” and have accepted war as inevitable.

(. . .)

Four days before the January 15 [1991] [UN] deadline [for Hussein to announce his withdrawal from Kuwait], the junior senator from Massachusetts rose on the Senate floor to argue against war. Kerry would later say that he wanted to contain Hussein, but in his speech that day, he dwelled on the horrors of war, which he had witnessed first hand in Vietnam, and not on the transgressions of a brutal Iraqi dictator.

“I had hoped after my reelection . . . to be able to return here and to talk about . . . economic priorities, about education . . .,” Kerry began. Instead, “we are talking about war, about countless of our families torn apart by duty and commitment to our country, of countless lives put on hold.”

“We have a way of quietly saying ‘war is hell’ or ‘war is horrible’ and then we move on,” Kerry said, “lost again in the words which describe the passions and the politics . . . Are we ready for the changes this war will bring – changes in sons and daughters who return from combat never the same . . . Are we ready?”

“Are we ready,” he asked his colleagues, “for another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims” and the enduring traumas faced by those who have fought in combat?

(. . .)

Since Vietnam, Kerry said, the American public had been “reaching for a set of ruling principles about when we go to war,” with the consensus arriving that “we should go to war when our vital interests are at stake in a way that the majority of Americans have identified and are agreed upon, and when we have exhausted all peaceful alternatives.”

That was not the case in the Persian Gulf, Kerry argued. “There is a rush to war here. [Because we think our military force can overwhelm Iraq], we are willing to act . . . with more bravado than patience.”

Pressure on Congress to rally around the president was wrongheaded, Kerry said, as it had been years earlier when “it cost us thousands of lives” in Vietnam. “It look to me like backing up the President’s decision has become the new vital interest, not the immediate liberation of Kuwait . . . It sounds like we are risking war for pride, not vital interests!” He also rejected the argument that supporting Bush’s resolution would give the administration leverage to force Hussein out of Kuwait. . . “That thinking is dangerous and flawed,” Kerry said, “This is not a vote about sending a message. It is a vote about war.”

In his lengthy speech . . . he repeatedly criticized Bush and his “unilateral” rush to war. “We are in this position today because the president of the United States made a series of decisions that have put us in this position.” With economic sanctions tightening their grip on Iraq, “there is no one who suggests that Saddam Hussein is winning anything today,” Kerry said.

In contrast to Kerry’s detailed condemnation of Bush, his references to the dangers posed by Hussein were brief and dismissive. Kerry acceded he was “well aware of the long-term danger of his arsenal – of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons.” But, he said, if the United States killed Hussein, another despot would take his place – unless the United States were to pursue “real peacemaking in the region.”

Kerry condemned “our impatience with sanctions and diplomacy,” noting that the country was not ready for the horrors of war, “for what it will witness and bear if we go to war.”

(. . .)

[On January 12, 1991, the Congress gave the president authority to go to war against Iraq. In the Hose, the vote was 250-183. In the Senate, it was 52-47, with Kerry voting against the resolution]

[When the January 15, 1991 UN deadline passed, there were 425,000 U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf region. They were joined by troops from 28 other nations, including five Arab countries.]

Appearing on CBS’s This Morning, Kerry said, “I’m convinced we’re doing this the wrong way.” Nevertheless, he added, “I’m going to back the president if a shot is fired.”

(. . .)

[Operation Desert Storm began on January 16, 1991]

After the successful launch of Operation Desert Storm, Kerry’s position became so nuanced that his office at one point mistakenly mailed letters to constituents that positioned him on both sides of the debate. On January 22, 1991, Kerry’s office sent a letter to one man, tanking him for expressing opposition to the deployment of additional U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. “I share your concerns,” Kerry wrote, noting that on January 11, he had voted against a resolution giving the president immediate authority to go to war.

On January 31, the same constituent received a letter stating, “From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush’s response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf.” Kerry blamed the mix-up on a computer error and subsequently wrote in defense of his position on the Gulf War: “The debate in the Senate was not about whether we should or should not have used force, but when force should be used.”

(. . .)

[On February 27, 1991, President Bush ordered a cease-fire, leaving Saddam in power.]

Three months after hostilities ceased, John Kerry attended a meeting of local Democrats in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and conceded. “I’m not convinced,” he said, “given the nature of Saddam Hussein,” that a peaceful resolution to the Kuwait invasion had been possible. Then he attacked Bush for leaving Hussein in power: “This administration, having likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, having committed troops in the war against him, actually sided with Hussein in the aftermath of the war. That is a disgraceful chapter.”

Posted by at October 9, 2004 09:04 PM