Will lead panel that thrust him to fame in '71WASHINGTON - More than three decades after he first appeared before the panel as a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran-turned-antiwar protester, Senator John F. Kerry will be named chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving him enormous influence over President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy, according to congressional officials.
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Still, from his new perch on the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry would play an "enormous gatekeeping role," said Ralph G. Carter, a professor at Texas Christian University and coauthor of the upcoming book, "Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs."
"The role of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair is enormously influential," Carter said. "It gives the person who holds it an incredible position to shape policy."
Along with the Judiciary and Finance committees, the Foreign Relations Committee was among the first three Senate panels established, in 1816.
It is responsible for vetting international treaties before ratification by the full Senate, and for conducting the confirmation hearings for presidential nominees for the State Department, including all foreign ambassadors.
The committee also oversees the State Department budget and funds foreign aid programs, helps set arms control policy, and authorizes military training for allied nations.
Kerry's elevation to chairman, to be announced as early as this week by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, is the culmination of a unique journey.
It began when a shaggy-haired Kerry, wearing his military ribbons, testified for nearly two hours before the panel on April 22, 1971, the first Vietnam veteran to do so.
Speaking on behalf of fellow veterans, he appealed for an end to US military involvement in Southeast Asia, posing the famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
In what proved to be a highly prescient remark, committee member Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island - a future chairman himself - expressed hope that the young Kerry would one day "be a colleague of ours in this body."
Now Kerry is set to take over the committee with an impressive set of credentials. He is the third-ranking Democrat on the committee, behind Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who will remain chairman of the Banking Committee. Kerry has served on the committee for 23 years - including stints as chairman of the Asia and Middle East subcommittees - and has overseen legislation on a wide range of issues, such as human rights and Russia's invasion of Georgia last summer.
He also negotiated the creation of a war crimes tribunal to try the perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia, was instrumental in normalizing US relations with Vietnam in 1994, and attended global climate change negotiations in Indonesia last year.
He has been a leading voice in recent years on several of the foremost foreign policy questions. Kerry, who voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war that Obama opposed, introduced the first Senate amendment in 2006 to withdraw US combat forces from Iraq. While backed by only 13 senators at the time, his position was later adopted by nearly all his Democratic colleagues, and by some Republicans.
In 2006, he was also among the first in Congress to call for more US troops in Afghanistan, a position that later became a key element of Obama's national security platform.
Over the years, Kerry, whose father was a career foreign service officer, has traveled widely to meet with political and military leaders. Earlier this year, he made official trips to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Turkey.
link Sen Biden on during Iraq debate on the Senate Floor,Sept 2007:
But before the Senator from Massachusetts leaves the floor, I wish to say to him--and I hope it will not in any way cause him any difficulty--he and I have been close friends for over 30 years, and I want him to know, and I want my colleagues to know, that much of what this amendment we are hopefully going to vote on is about is what the Senator and I have talked about for the last 4 years and that he has led on, including the international piece.
As a matter of fact, he led on it from a different perspective, as a candidate, as well. So I wish to tell him how grateful I am for his joining in this amendment. Quite frankly, it is a big deal that he is, and it adds not only credibility to the amendment in terms of our colleagues, but it adds, quite frankly, an international credibility to it because an awful lot of people around the world look to my colleague for his insights into what we do about the most critical issue facing American foreign policy today.
The truth is, in order for us to regain the kind of leadership in the world that I would argue we are lacking, we have to settle Iraq, and we cannot do it on our own. There is a need for the international community. Even if this answer is the perfect answer, it cannot be made in America any longer.
So I wish to thank my colleague and acknowledge that I have learned from him, and I wish to thank him for--and I know we use the phrase very blithely around here--his leadership. But I mean that. I wish to thank him for his leadership. He has been absolutely totally consistent on this point from before the time we actually used force in Iraq until today. So I want the record to reflect that.
Op-ed in the NYT before the Iraq war:
By JOHN F. KERRY
Published: September 6, 2002
It may well be that the United States will go to war with Iraq. But if so, it should be because we have to -- not because we want to. For the American people to accept the legitimacy of this conflict and give their consent to it, the Bush administration must first present detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and then prove that all other avenues of protecting our nation's security interests have been exhausted. Exhaustion of remedies is critical to winning the consent of a civilized people in the decision to go to war. And consent, as we have learned before, is essential to carrying out the mission. President Bush's overdue statement this week that he would consult Congress is a beginning, but the administration's strategy remains adrift.
Regime change in Iraq is a worthy goal. But regime change by itself is not a justification for going to war. Absent a Qaeda connection, overthrowing Saddam Hussein -- the ultimate weapons-inspection enforcement mechanism -- should be the last step, not the first. Those who think that the inspection process is merely a waste of time should be reminded that legitimacy in the conduct of war, among our people and our allies, is not a waste, but an essential foundation of success.
If we are to put American lives at risk in a foreign war, President Bush must be able to say to this nation that we had no choice, that this was the only way we could eliminate a threat we could not afford to tolerate.
In the end there may be no choice. But so far, rather than making the case for the legitimacy of an Iraq war, the administration has complicated its own case and compromised America's credibility by casting about in an unfocused, overly public internal debate in the search for a rationale for war. By beginning its public discourse with talk of invasion and regime change, the administration has diminished its most legitimate justification of war -- that in the post-Sept. 11 world, the unrestrained threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein is unacceptable and that his refusal to allow in inspectors is in blatant violation of the United Nations 1991 cease-fire agreement that left him in power.
The administration's hasty war talk makes it much more difficult to manage our relations with other Arab governments, let alone the Arab street. It has made it possible for other Arab regimes to shift their focus to the implications of war for themselves rather than keep the focus where it belongs -- on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his deadly arsenal. Indeed, the administration seems to have elevated Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his neighbors to a level he would never have achieved on his own.
There is, of course, no question about our capacity to win militarily, and perhaps to win easily. There is also no question that Saddam Hussein continues to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and his success can threaten both our interests in the region and our security at home. But knowing ahead of time that our military intervention will remove him from power, and that we will then inherit all or much of the burden for building a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, is all the more reason to insist on a process that invites support from the region and from our allies. We will need that support for the far tougher mission of ensuring a future democratic government after the war.
The question is not whether we should care if Saddam Hussein remains openly scornful of international standards of behavior that he agreed to live up to. The question is how we secure our rights with respect to that agreement and the legitimacy it establishes for the actions we may have to take. We are at a strange moment in history when an American administration has to be persuaded of the virtue of utilizing the procedures of international law and community -- institutions American presidents from across the ideological spectrum have insisted on as essential to global security.
For the sake of our country, the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq, the administration must seek advice and approval from Congress, laying out the evidence and making the case. Then, in concert with our allies, it must seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement from the United Nations Security Council. We should at the same time offer a clear ultimatum to Iraq before the world: Accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise. Some in the administration actually seem to fear that such an ultimatum might frighten Saddam Hussein into cooperating. If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act. But until we have properly laid the groundwork and proved to our fellow citizens and our allies that we really have no other choice, we are not yet at the moment of unilateral decision-making in going to war against Iraq.
John F. Kerry, a Democrat, is a senator from Massachusetts.
Statement during one of the 2004 Presidential debates:
I will make a flat statement: The United States of America has no long-term designs on staying in Iraq.
KERRY: And our goal in my administration would be to get all of the troops out of there with a minimal amount you need for training and logistics as we do in some other countries in the world after a war to be able to sustain the peace.
linkWhen Kerry officially takes over as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it'll be a poetic moment.
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