Secretary of State John Kerry seems to be very anxious to get the United
States involved in the Syrian civil
war. He predicted on “This Week” that
Congress will authorize the president to order a military strike on Syria as
punishment for the country’s alleged use of chemical weapons against its
civilian population last month.
“We are not going to lose this vote,” Kerry said of the coming debate to
authorize military action against Syria
when Congress returns from recess. “The president of the United
States is committed to securing the unity of
purpose that he believes strengthens America.
And I believe the Congress will see that that’s the responsible thing to do
here.”
Speaking from the Rose Garden at the White House Saturday, President Obama
said that although he believed he had the authority to order an attack on Syria
without the authorization of Congress, he had decided to seek their consent
before ordering any such strike on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Funny thing about ole swift boat
Kerry, he has always had a reputation of being “for it before he was against
it” or “against it before he was for it”.
In 1991, during the debate before the first Gulf War Kerry initially opposed
the immediate use of military force to expel Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait.
The United Nations had imposed sanctions on
Iraq, and Kerry
argued that the sanctions then in place should be given more time to work.
On December 14, 2001, 3 months after the attacks of 9/11, Kerry said on
Larry King Live that "I think we clearly have to keep the pressure on
terrorism globally.
This doesn't end
with Afghanistan
by any imagination.
And I think the
president has made that clear.
I think
we have made that clear.
Terrorism is a
global menace.
It's a scourge.
And it is absolutely vital that we continue
against, for instance, Saddam Hussein."
Kerry said on October 9, 2002;
"I will be voting to give the President of the United
States the authority to use force, if
necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our
security."
Kerry also gave a January 23, 2003 speech to Georgetown
University saying "Without
question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein.
He is a brutal, murderous dictator; leading an oppressive regime he
presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to
miscalculation.
So the threat of Saddam
Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real."
Kerry had spoken before the war about the sorts of weapons many believed
Saddam Hussein had.
On the Senate floor
on October 9, 2002, he said
that "According to the CIA's report,
all U.S.
intelligence experts agree that Iraq
is seeking nuclear weapons. There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants
to develop nuclear weapons."
After the invasion of Iraq,
when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Kerry strongly criticized Bush,
contending that he had misled the country: "When the President of the United
States looks at you and tells you something,
there should be some trust."
Back in the mid 80s, John Kerry was
against President Reagan’s arming of the Nicaraguan anti-Communist Contra
forces because, “America
should not subvert its values “by funding terrorism to overthrow governments of
other countries”. Yet here he stands, arguing that we should fund and arm
the rebels, who have been linked to a known terrorist organization like
al-Qaeda, so they can overthrow their government. (Not to mention the illegal funneling of arms
to the Syrian rebels through Benghazi
– which still isn’t being discussed or answered for.)
The
following comments are just a part of John Kerry’s testimony which was given
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971.
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in
South Vietnam which could
happen that realistically threatens the United States of
America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one
American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the
preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the
height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel
has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a
people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial
influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had
enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight
against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn’t even know the difference
between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies
without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages
and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war,
particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to
leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding
with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet
Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in
those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first-hand how
monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw
that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by
the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw
Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as
well as by Viet Cong terrorism – and yet we listened while this country tried
to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages
in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of
morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to
give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing
gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting
anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a
cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States falsification of
body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month
after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought
using weapons against” Oriental human beings.” We fought using weapons against
those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we
fighting in the European theater.
We watched while men charged up hills because a general
said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons
they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese.
We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into
extravaganzas, because we couldn’t lose, and we couldn’t retreat, and because
it didn’t matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so
there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so
many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch
quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible
arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. Each day to facilitate the process by
which the United States washes her hands
of Vietnam someone has to
give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit
something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we
have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and
these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”
We are asking
Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man
to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a
man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the
problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and
parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people
in this country – the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and
so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking
umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a
continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of
violations of those Geneva Conventions… That is what we are trying to say. It
is part and parcel of everything… We are here to ask, and we are here to ask
vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?
We’re here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy,
Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent
off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their
troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says
they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their
dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious
shield of public rectitude. They’ve left the real stuff of their reputations
bleaching behind them in the sun in this country…
But, all those examples were
Then, and Syrian is NOW. Now he
believes it is our duty to become involver in their civil war. What do you think?
This post was a follow up on "The Situation in Syria" which can be found here:
