John Kerry's Face the Nation comments regarding American soldiers

John Kerry, on NBC's "Meet the Press" April 18, 1971:

"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used .50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals."

With the exception of the fairly amusing "Iraqis should be doing that", I don't see anything particularly controversial or interesting about what he said. It's a no-brainer.

I do like the "Stop the angry hippies!" t-shirt advertisement on the Political Teen website, though.

no-one cares what john kerry thinks now anyway

except for john kerry.

It's sort of chilling that statements like this, or obviously Murtha's "possibly we should have a strategy here" move, get quashed a bit just on the supposedly distasteful or impolite suggestion that, duh, war involves Bad Things -- it's deeply creepy to think of the extent to which basic acknowledgement and/or discussion of those Bad Things has been absent lately. Bush may in a sense have lucked out with the focus in that regard being on prisoner treatment / torture / Abu Ghraib, which maybe diverts attention from everyday action into a much more formalized legal realm. Kerry can claim a pretty proud history of not having problems acknowledging the everyday-type issues of a war.

That said, ouch, his phrasing there is vaguely unfortunate, not just in the sense that some people will react badly to it but also in the sense that it doesn't effectively get across his point -- which seems to be that, what, the fact of having American soldiers as the face of home searches and other invasive-toward-civilians actions is way more problematic than putting it in the hands of Iraqis. Extemporaneous speaking is just kind of an impossibility these days, isn't it, what with people usually looking more for opportunities to savage you than for opportunities to sort out what it is you're really trying to get across.

i think it's been that way ever since newspapers were invented, nabisco.

I don't know if that's true, Tracer! Like even just watching Kerry on -- it was Dick Cavett, right? -- I get the sense of a moment where people were much more prepared to spend time and energy digesting more than 60 seconds of an organized argument.

And even that was paltry, but it seems unthinkable compared to today -- watch some of that talk around the early 70s and it's like practically French or something, or at least kind of the Charlie Rose / Ben Wattenberg level that wouldn't currently fly on anything but public television.

i'm just saying i don't think it's some kind of steady progression from enlightened political discourse --> contextless demagoguery. in the 1850s man, the fur was flyin and nobody gave a shit.

They should bring back duelling.

they had better weed in the 1850s, too.

Man, what kind of teenager wants to be associated with a group called The ______ Teen?

Obv the right wing talking points memo has gone out for the week ("Bush isn't really fucking up.. OMG L@@K SOME d00d WITH A SIGN"), and now they are spamming.

Oh, sure, Tracer -- my use of "these days" wasn't meant to imply a whole Decline-and-Fall narrative!

schweet

"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way."
—Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

what about Joe Lieb's comments about the war?

AKA if anyone's going to brutalise people, it should be Iraqis, acting with our support, not us ourselves. Cos that'll really help, won't it?

I listened to a lot of stuff about the war when I was in the US recently. The danger here is that both the DLC style we need more troops critique or the Murtha it's nothing to do with us anymore are utter shite.

The mainstream attachment to patriotism, to exceptionalism is royally fucking US foreign Policy in the ass. It's like the woman in Fahrenheit 911 who loses her son, but sees no connection whatsoever with her uber-patriotism. I've never seen such a militaristic society as the USA, yet I was in SF and LA. I dread to think what it gets like in more rural areas and less cosmopolitan towns.

ihttp://www.mckeehen.net/images/Reb.JPG

haha - where are you from that makes SF seems 'militaristic' by comparison?

The UK. The army is this kind of separate state that does it own thing as long as it leaves us alone. People who go on about the troops or respecting our soldiers gets the raised eyebrow treatment.

or they get reelected

hahaha

*zing*

Dave, that first post is littered with intentional misreadings.

"If anyone's going to brutalise people, it should be Iraqis" -- subsequent sputtering over historical and religious customs seems to imply that Kerry is saying Iraqis will be able to perform the same tasks with less of a sense of invasion or brutality, given their better knowledge of the context. Even in the terms you're arguing, this would constitute an improvement, of sorts (unless you're just inclined to poo-poo well-intentioned or positive chances as bullshit because they don't stretch far enough).

"the DLC style we need more troops critique" -- this seems to vague and simplified and undetermined to even go into.

"the Murtha it's nothing to do with us anymore" -- this seems outright misinformed; Murtha's proposal here has very little to do with what's "to do with us" and everything to do with the facts that our military is stretched very thinly, that we will shortly have to do something about redeployment in Iraq, and that there is no good reason not to have and publically discuss some sort of plan for how these things are going to be handled.

Plus even the simplifications you're putting on those things send you in a pretty unconstructive direction, where you acknowledge some sort of coalition responsibility to "stay" (w/r/t Murtha) but then simultaneously shit on suggestions about how that staying might actually work (w/r/t Kerry) -- you can be right about all of these things but it doesn't really accomplish much apart from letting you talk like you know better. (You're not alone in that one: a pretty good chunk of Americans "knew better" before this war ever started!)

That last graph is also tough for me to go into, because, e.g., I don't necessarily see why Farenheit-woman should be experiencing any particular cognitive dissonance about losing a son in the execution of her patriotic ideals; this is how losing-sons-at-war has more or less always worked. I can swallow never having seen a society as militaristic as the US, but then a bunch of trailing thoughts come up about militarism in close proximity versus the US's creepily abstracted militarism, and then on a more basic level it occurs to me that most people have never "seen" societies as militaristic as the US because the world's many, many super-militaristic locales tend not to be pleasant places to go on holiday.

That a man could live through what Kerry lived through in the aftermath of his VN testimony, and what he lived through again with the Swift Boaters, and could not think of a better way to express this (valid) thought:

"and there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the -- of -- of -- of -- historical customs, religious customs..."

proves to me that John Kerry is a moron of the highest order. What a, what a fool. That he is politically not adept is one thing. It's like Hillary Clinton sat him down and said "John, you need to express dissatifaction with Iraq policy in a way as to allow douchebags to absolutely crucify you for dissing the troops. Can you do that? Good man! Well, I off to outlaw flag-burning!"

I agree with his sentiment, but he wasn't very articulate about it. I think calling him a moron of the highest order is a bit strong, though.

Corrections: I should say that Kerry is kind of pie-eyed hopefully suggesting that certain things would go over much better with an Iraqi face on them, which may or may not be true, but at least seems to be offered in good faith. And I should correct that I am thinking of the wrong Farenheit-woman, and that you mean another person whose form of cognitive dissonance I'm not sure we need to question; in fact I can see how it might be considered quite admirable for a woman to happily entrust her son's life to the assumed good faith of her leaders, and then, afterward, seek some explanation. Sneering at that misses part of the way she's being used, rhetorically, in that bit, which is that she represents -- like loads of Americans -- the Innocent, a type you might find more visible if you went to, say, Dekalb, instead of the Bay Area: The Innocent believes in the basic positive ideals the country claims, and play along with them with total good faith. (And when that's not rewarded, the rhetorical strategy is obviously to swing the finger toward the people who are in charge of making those ideals work, as if the case here.)

WTF, Hunter, maybe I'm just asking you to simmer down some meaningless hyperbole here, but if expressing yourself with less than ideal precision while speaking extemporaneously in front of television cameras makes someone a "moron of the highest order," then that "highest order" is a little too broadly cast to really merit the "highest." It's a really unfortunate way for that thought to come out, certainly, no shit, but let's be real. (Though I suppose we can always forget being real and play post-interview quarterback, which is maybe more fun and lets us feel smarter than well-known people.)

WTF people? Was Kerry not merely saying that it should be Iraqis handling whatever needs to be handled in these situations, not "Iraqis should be the ones going into homes and raping and pillaging and fucking shit up?"

it isn't hard to feel smarter than Kerry. His political maneouvering on the issue of the war has been alternately opportunistic and clumsy.

Sorry - I was listening to an NPR interview with Murtha, where his response to the argument that the response to the criticism that if the US pull out, there will be a Civil War was 'so be it - it's their problem, not ours.' The clear intention was that the situation was now an Iraqi problem and not worth US lives. I know it's more nuanced, and he actually said the answer is more troops, but since that can't happen without a draft, then the US should pull out. But he doesn't actually question whether the US should have been there, which is the big elephant shitting in the corner of the room.

H Clinton seems to be with Lieberman in the 'mustn't look like a weakling on war' and so wraps herself in the flag to achieve a hit on Bush that doesn't compromise her. Humphrey 1968 springs to mind in terms of missing the target. As Daniel Ellsberg said the other week, there's a difference between being weak on National Security and being stupid on national security, but the right-Democrats seem determined to repeat errors and fail to step up to the challenge of their generation and articulate a vitally important argument. For that, they deserve to lose office as they've failed the challenge of leadership.

As for the militarism, sure, my experience of countries isn't as rich. And sure, militarism isn't as prevalent these days. But doesn't that say something? I've travelled Europe and never felt impelled to comprehend the fact that the countries I visit have a standing army. But I couldn't escape it in the US

As it happens, I think we should just go. We can't stop it being bad and never could. We can't stop people killing people in the name of shia or sunni islam, but we can stop them killing people in the name of iraqi liberation.

I guess I never saw much mention of the standing army in France, though the militaristic police presence on the Paris Metro was more than a little disconcerting. Not used to seeing guards toting submachine guns.

Kerry is not stupid. Dean isn't stupid either. But these guys both tend to assume people will understand what they intend to say rather than what they really say. (Kerry should thank Dean for sticking his foot in his mouth - big time - almost immediately afterward, thus drawing nearly all the media attention..)

I'm sticking to my guns here - Kerry IS stupid. By voting for the war he either a) thought that the war was winnable and justified and therefore he was going to be on the right side of it, or b) thought he was buying himself political cover for his run for the presidency, and would be able to talk his way out of it later if the war went badly. Both assumptions are stupid - average joe voter idiot like me could easily tell the war was trumped up bullshit without a prayer of "success". Conversely, voting for the war so as not to appear "unpatriotic" or whatever demonstrates startling political ineptitude - how could he not see that such a vote would undermine his credibility? Fuck that guy.

Well, I would argue that "the war" was winnable, and was effectively won in however many days. Unfortunately absolutely _no_ thought was put into what comes after the army capitulates and SH is captured. Bush and co. believed that the Iraqis would behave like the Germans and Czechs in the early 90s, completely forgetting the Albania, Romanias, and Tajikistans of the world.

Bush voters re-elected the moron. They shouldn't be able to duck the consequences of their actions, should they?

The resolution to authorize the use of force was accepted by many Democrats, in my opinion, because the administration made the case for war only not only on intelligence about weapons programs, but also made the case that we would be enforcing UN security council resolutions. Well, we didn't go to through the UN, the WMD evidence has proven bogus, and the war has been a strategic disaster. But still, Democrats are caught holding the bag because "they voted for it." I don't really buy that. The US used a lot of military threats in the Clinton era in regards to Iraq's noncompliace with the UN, but Hussein always folded and let inspectors in.

xpost

Shakey regardless of whether or not I would agree with you that analysis circumvents the argument Kerry would offer, which is that he never voted "for" any "war," but rather voted to give Bush the authority to take certain actions (wiseness and/or consequences of which actions would still ultimately be Bush's responsibility, not strictly that of those who authorized him to take them). I am obviously playing Kerry's-advocate here.

This is a total statement of the obvious and previously stated, but I'll do it anyway. The problem Democrats are having right now is the actually super-tricky task of addressing two completely different war issues. The first issue is the process of getting into the war to begin with -- the administration's push to do it at all, and their pathetic inability to think through long-term consequences and strategies. (This had much more sway before the 2004 election, because all that process-of-war stuff had a direct bearing on whether the Bush administration was competent and reliable in terms of making further decisions.) The second, separate issue is what we do now, which involves accepting that shit decisions have been made, that they can't be reversed, and that we have to work from here. The left has been much better at that first part, the questioning-decisions part, than it has been at advancing a very appealing strategy for what to do now, in part because all those shit-decisions have left very few particularly appetizing options for what to do now -- no matter what, it kinda sucks.

Also just look how divided "the left" is on the what-to-do-now issue anyway! Some on the far left have been advocating complete-withdrawal from the get-go, which used to strike me as completely irresponsible (Pottery Barn rule, etc); there have been plenty of moments where my ideal would have been to Stay the Course, responsibly, only preferably with an administration that could be counted on to make decent decisions about how to make things better. But so then we cruise gradually toward a whole deeper issue, which is: at what point do we conclude that we aren't going to be able to make things better, at all, meaning the "responsible" thing to do (responsible to Iraq, I'm saying) would be to get the hell out?

And so of course the right gets to sound more organized and sensible and on-point about this sort of thing. Their message, when they're not abandoning Bush like nuts, can be pretty simple: stay the course, finish the mission, trust the administration to do it right. But really on some level I feel like all the left's dithering and conflict and rhetorical boners and so on -- all the shit some of you guys are calling moronic or opportunistic or hypocritical or stupid -- all of this stuff is actually kind of doing the job of raising all the tough issues that the simple course-staying rhetoric is trying so hard to avoid. Even a boner like this Kerry one at least raises a bunch of big vexed issues that we should probably really be thinking about, boring as they may be: what are our soldiers doing on the ground, what kind of long-term effect is it really having on the opinions of ordinary non-insurgent Iraqi civilians, would it be better hearts-and-minds-wise if some of that stuff was done by Iraqis themselves, etc. etc. Same goes way more for Murtha, who if you clear away whatever he personally thinks about Iraq has basically just raised a really basic logistical issue: we can't support this forever, and we need to have clear options for what happens next.

But if the US pulled out and the Iraqis got as aggressive as they need to then John Kerry will be the first to come to the floor of the Senate and express outrage at the actions of the Iraqi government. It's a catch 22 situation.

The US is not going to pull out, at least not under George W. Bush. The plan was, and remains, to stay. At least until someone gets elected/installed that will allow the US to use Iraq as a military base from which the US can whack Syria/Iran/Jordan etc. -- and even then the pullout won't be complete, it'll be just as much as is politically required.

Top Democrats must see this, so I imagine their calls for a pullout fall somewhere along the spectrum of pullout only as much as is politically required, maintaining a big stick to whack with at one end and total repudiation of the whacking-in-the-Middle-East strategy on the other. The latter is, or would be, a principled stand, but my question for them would be, what is their alternative strategy for giving the US a leg up in the coming oil war?

</don weiner>

Hmm, I've been away. I respect your nod to having a better sense of proportionality, nabisco, but I'm sticking with my attack on Kerry regarding this issue.

Kerry did a great thing with his VN testimony. When the "grown-ups" in Congress and the Administration of the time would not do their jobs to address the real problems that were before them, he tried to force them to face those issues. And he was smeared for it ruthlessly. Then, and then again in 2004. In fact, I'm willing to argue that the Swift Boat attacks on him, which were totally unbelieveable, reprehensible shenanigans, were enough to make the difference in the election. I was as disappointed as I've ever been in my country, right up there with the whole transparently false lead up to Iraq. At least with the lead-up to Iraq, I can understand that the public believed the Administration, on the basis that the public did not have access to the intelligence that the Congress and the Administration had. I mean, it was obvious to me that the administration meant war, and that the entire affair was not events-driven, or even conditions-driven, but agenda-driven, but I'm a pretty suspicious person.

Anyway, John Kerry pretty much spends his time figuring out how to say things to people, how to advance his positions. This is an issue that I think helped to kill his candidacy, and gave us W. If John Kerry can't figure out how to say that we're doing the wrong thing in Iraq, to no good end, at huge cost to both our own soldiers and to Iraqis, I think he's got very real thinking problems that he can't ever fix. I'll be surprised if ever he mounts a credible presidential candidacy again, anyway. You can argue that, big deal, this incident just means Kerry isn't a good politician, that he's speaking important truths, man. Well, he IS a politician, and this "criticizing the troops" thing is NOT a hard one to get round, and he needs to be at least good enough not to step in the same shit twice.

I have thoughts about the Iraq discussion yall are having, but I'm too tired now, maybe later.

Dude just needs an editor.

Max Cleland laments new swiftboating in the wake of Face the Nation by O'Neill, concludes with:

"Like many other Vietnam veterans, John Kerry does not want to see the same movie replayed over again."

Joe Lieberman really wants to be Secretary of Defense

Lieberman Calls For Formation Of 'War Cabinet'

By DAVID LIGHTMAN
The Hartford Courant

December 6 2005, 11:43 AM EST

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, increasingly isolated in his own Democratic party because of his strong support for the Iraq war, today called on the White House and congressional leaders to form a special "war cabinet" to provide advice and direction for the war effort.

The Connecticut Democrat's "Bipartisan Victory in Iraq Administrative Group," designed to take some of the political edge off the war debate, would be modeled after similar panels during the Vietnam War and World War II.

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril..."

i've said it before and i'll say it again, what the Democrats need to do is decide on who's going to run in 2008 NOW and fuck the entire primary system, then that person can go around and rebut everything, make the speeches, get battle-tested etc; "but that's crazy talk" yeah well, what are the drawbacks?

aside from possibly being illegal, i mean

Gee, imagine that:

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned from a top GOP operative that the Republican National Committee will provide state parties with a web video prior to release tomorrow afternoon that shows a white flag waving over images of Democrat leaders making anti-war remarks.

The ad is in response to the controversial comments Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry made earlier in the week.
http://www.drudgereport.com/hdean.JPG

Now, granted, I don't have high expectations of the RNC, they'll do about anything. But, there's ways to say what both Kerry and Dean said that provides far less of a handhold for this type of utter bullshit.

i find it entertaining that they brought back the "defeat & retreat" meme from last year. it's a good thing that they just kept on campaigning.

in other news, we begin pulling out next week.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday he expects some 20,000 U.S. troops to return home from Iraq after next week's elections, and he suggested that some of the remaining 137,000 forces could pull out next year.

He still wants to torture people, tho, so what are you gunna do?

I just want to point out that it's been about a year and a half now that I've been completely incapable of composing a coherent sentence on the topic of our war in Iraq, or see Rumsfeld's face without suffering from acute temporary tourette's syndrome. It is almost every other day that I walk through this town, see someone who looks like they might be the kind of person who has never served in the military but supports the Bush admin's approach to the war on terror, and want to grab them by the collar, throw them against a wall, and hit them in the face with a crowbar that has been dipped in napalm.

TGIF.

Tom your ire at an admin full of non-serviam rich kids running a war like it was a stock gambit is & has been a wondrous thing to see, if that's any comfort

Every other day? Try every other hour.

I been trying to cut down.

Your anger IS very nourishing. Keep up the good work.

I don't see those kind of people too often but there is evidently a proud Hann1ty fan in the office and just walking by this person's cubicle makes me see red. Rumsfeld broke the army. Rummy, you're doing a heckuva job..