Kerry's between a rock and a hard place. Not because of his position on the Iraq war. Because the RNC, the press, and even some bloggers from the left either refuse or are unable to grasp the difference between nuance and the act of stipulating.
A mother tells her 4 year old child, "ok, you can have that pop-cycle, but you have to take it outside." Is that nuance?
John Kerry said, effectively, "you can have the AUTHORITY to go to war, but you have to let the inspectors finish, you have to work with the U.N., and you can only attack if all else fails."
My friends, this is only slightly more complicated than the conditions upon which the 4 year old was granted the pop-cycle.
Now, we can debate the wisdom of trusting george Bush to comply with the stipulations Kerry
clearly laid out when he voted to authorize the war, but they are not nuanced.
According to Websters, nuanced, a French word, means shades of subtle distinction or variation.
It's interesting to note how convenient this word is for the RNC. They get to call Kerry wishy-washy and French in one word. Someone should Nexis "Kerry" AND "Nuanced" and see if it traces back to Frank Luntz.
I personally disagreed with Kerry's vote. I still do. But I see his point also. Though it's a big fat lie to claim that "everyone thought Saddam had WMDs" before the war, there was a decent chance that he still did. And what a lot of reasonable people thought was the only way to get Saddam to submit, was to give an unambiguous signal that we're not messing around this time.
For many, including Kerry, that's what the vote was about. And guess what? It worked.
Remember, in the immediate runup to the war Saddam folded like a wet blanket. He actually allowed inspecters into his private palaces. He offered to let, not just the UN inspectors in, but U.S. inspectors as well.
Which raises another point: Regardless of what the intel said in 2002, there was absolutely no excuse for not knowing Iraq's WMD capabilities by the first few months of 2003. Hans Blix was making progress. Saddam Hussein was scared. We had every opportunity to find the truth and not alienate our allies. Where the CIA may have failed, the weapons inspectors were sure to succeed.
And so there's also no nuance to John Kerry's contention that it was a mistake not to let the inspectors finish their job.
People on the left, think what this means. Kerry would have let the inspectors get around to confirming that Iraq's WMD program was a myth. He would have confirmed, as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice stated in 2001, that containment was working and the US was under no eminent threat. Almost 1000 US soldiers would still be alive, as well as 10,000 Iraqi citizens.
So while we would like Kerry to just come out and say the war was a mistake, he really has no choice but to stick to his position: authorizing the war was the right thing to do, what Bush did with that authorization was the mistake. Whether you agree with his vote, it was rational. It wasn't nuanced.
So what's really at issue here is this: Was it a mistake for Kerry to trust George Bush not to blunder his newfound authority?
That's a debate we can take to November.