Reply #120: The party would still have been split - with the center hard to hold [View All]

[karynnj]

Given the numbers at the time, he had to win both the anti-war people (which he did) and a portion of the people who still supported the war, but thought he could do better.

You didn't have to listen to many Kerry speeches to know that he would never go to war unless it genuinely was a last resort. In 2004, I believed this because of speeches over his entire career - which made the IWR Senate speech combined with the Georgetown Jan 23, 2003 speech believable. I understood his philosophy on war and peace.

Last year, Kerry gave a remarkable speech that exposed part of the foundation that underlies his views. In addition to his foreign policy point of view and his experience with how horrifying war is, he has clearly studied the religious and ethical issues behind war. Kerry's speech at the Conservative Pepperdine College is at:http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=4212

Here's what he says on just war.
"Augustine felt that wars of choice are generally unjust wars, that war—the organized killing of human beings, of fathers, brothers, friends—should always be a last resort, that war must always have a just cause, that those waging war need the right authority to do so, that a military response must be proportionate to the provocation, that a war must have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal and that war must discriminate between civilians and combatants.

In developing the doctrine of Just War, Augustine and his many successors viewed self-restraint in warfare as a religious obligation, not as a pious hope contingent on convincing one’s adversaries to behave likewise. Throughout the centuries there have been Christian political leaders who argued otherwise; who contended that observing Just War principles was weak, naïve, or even cowardly.

It’s in Americas’ interests to maintain our unquestionable moral authority — and we risk losing it when leaders make excuses for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or when an Administration lobbies for torture.

For me, the just war criteria with respect to Iraq are very clear: sometimes a President has to use force to fight an enemy bent on using weapons of mass destruction to slaughter innocents. But no President should ever go to war because they want to—you go to war only because you have to. The words “last resort” have to mean something .

In Iraq, those words were rendered hollow. It was wrong to prosecute the war without careful diplomacy that assembled a real coalition. Wrong to prosecute war without a plan to win the peace and avoid the chaos of looting in Baghdad and streets full of raw sewage. Wrong to prosecute a war without considering the violence it would unleash and what it would do to the lives of innocent people who would be in danger."

This context gives more weight to all the bolded phrases that were repeated daily in 2004. As I said I believed Kerry when he said in 2004 that he would not have gone to war. Reading this, I am certain that I can trust him.


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