Late one night in September 2002, Senate Democrats were bitterly debating whether to authorize war with Iraq. Sen. John Kerry had been agonizing over the issue, but now he was urging colleagues to support a compromise that would still give President Bush much of the power he sought.
Liberals were steamed. “Why would you trust the president?” asked Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Despite such objections, Kerry (D-Mass.) two weeks later voted for the congressional resolution paving the way for the war. And no issue has dogged him more than that single vote, which has come under fire from the left and the right.
Many Democrats have criticized him for supporting the war. Republicans have accused him of changing his position for political gain.
A look at how Kerry made up his mind on the war vote makes clear how conflicted he was before he cast his vote. The concerns that plagued him–the questions he asked at public hearings, the caveats and reservations he voiced on the Senate floor before casting his vote–reflected his ambivalence as well as his ambition. And that ambivalence sowed the seeds of Kerry’s future digressions on the issue, including his vote a year later against a bill providing $87 billion in aid that went mainly to Iraq.
As it appeared increasingly likely in July 2002 that Bush would pursue war with Iraq, Kerry–a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee–attended the first of several hearings conducted by the panel on the subject. Witnesses presented a grim view of Iraq’s weapons capabilities. But Kerry said that, based on his Middle East visit, he thought the region’s U.S. allies regarded Iraq with less alarm than the White House.
He also said he did not believe Iraq had nuclear weapons but that Hussein had nuclear scientists working on acquiring the materials to construct them. And he openly wondered what the threshold for going to war would be.
“The question we need to think about is what brings you to the point of pulling the trigger,” Kerry said at the hearing.
In early September, Bush announced he would seek congressional approval to “do whatever is necessary to deal with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Kerry decried what he described as a rush to war and expressed skepticism about the administration’s commitment to working through the UN.
In mid-September, the White House asked Congress for broad, open-ended authority to use force against Iraq if Bush decided it was necessary. Lawmakers of both parties, including Kerry, balked.
Kerry joined Sens. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in backing a compromise to emphasize further diplomatic efforts by the UN to restore arms inspections in Iraq. The proposal also would have made clear that the purpose of war with Iraq would be to dismantle weapons of mass destruction.
But Kerry and Biden could not sway liberal Democrats, such as Boxer, at the meeting in late September to seek support for the compromise.
“There was a strain in the room because we knew we were dealing with life and death,” Boxer recalled.
Boxer fought compromise
Kerry argued that the compromise would prod Bush to build a multinational coalition against Hussein. “He was very fervent that he trusted that the president would not go alone, that he would build a coalition,” Boxer said. “I disagreed.”
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Ultimately, the compromise was scuttled when Bush and then-House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) reached accord on a broader war authorization than Kerry had been contemplating. That left Kerry with a decision on whether to support the measure.
As the run-up to the war intensified, key lawmakers began to raise questions about the urgency of the threat from Baghdad and pushed for more information.
Kerry attended a briefing by then-CIA Director George Tenet, Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford Jr. and other senior officials. The intelligence picture they presented was mixed, with Tenet unequivocal in describing Iraq as a threat while Ford raised doubts, according to a Senate aide who sat in on the meeting.
A week before the Senate vote, Kerry and other lawmakers got their best chance to review intelligence data when the CIA belatedly sent to Congress a detailed assessment of Iraq’s weapons programs. The conclusions at the top of the 93-page report were unambiguous.
“We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs,” the executive summary said.
The rest of the report was more complicated and nuanced.
Kerry did not read the report, his aides say, because he had been briefed on its contents by Tenet.
The weekend before the Senate vote, Kerry attended a Democratic fundraiser in Iowa and drew sustained applause for raising questions about the push for war. But he was still weighing his options.
“I have the ability either way to make substantive arguments for what I’m doing,” Kerry told The Boston Globe.
He denied that his presidential aspirations would influence his decision. “This is a gut, conscience vote. It has nothing to do with politics.”
Less than two days before the Senate vote on Oct. 11, Kerry announced that his gut told him to vote for the resolution. But his speech on the Senate floor was riddled with reservations and caveats.
`Yes’ vote was qualified
“Let there be no doubt or confusion,” Kerry said. “I will support a multilateral effort to disarm [Hussein] by force, if we ever exhaust those other options as the president has promised. But I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible.”
There was nothing in the resolution that guaranteed those conditions would be met. Nonetheless, he was one of 29 Democrats voting for the resolution, which passed 77-23.
In December, less than a week after he announced he was exploring a presidential bid, Kerry accused Bush of forcing the war debate to distract from economic problems.
In autumn 2003, his criticism of Bush’s polices led to his vote against the $87 billion bill financing continued operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Critics say Kerry’s vote was politically motivated. The surprise leader in the Democratic presidential race had become Dean, who had ridden a strong tide of anti-war sentiment among party activists.
Kerry said he voted against the bill because Bush had gone to war recklessly and without a plan for postwar Iraq.
But even non-partisan analysts say that voting for the war resolution and then opposing the subsequent funding measure is a key part of the GOP attack on him as a flip-flopper.
“The strategic blunder is that he’s allowed Bush to make the case that this guy is all over the map,” said Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford University political scientist.