“How do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
-John Kerry, Testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971
A much younger and certainly more idealistic John Kerry said those words to our Senate and the American people 35 years ago. Today, in an op-ed in the New York Times, the Senator from Massachusetts became another sane voice in our country calling for extricating ourselves from the failed Iraq war.
WE are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first was against Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The second was against terrorists whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here. Now we find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war.
Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion. We want democracy in Iraq, but Iraqis must want it as much as we do. Our valiant soldiers can’t bring democracy to Iraq if Iraq’s leaders are unwilling themselves to make the compromises that democracy requires.
In the piece, Sen. Kerry calls for a May 15 deadline for formation of a unity government and for removal of American combat troops by the end of the year. He asks the Bush administration to finally attempt real diplomacy through a “Dayton Accords-like summit” to bring Sunnis and Shiites to the bargaining table. And he calls for redeployment to remove the constant irritant of US soldiers that has served as Al Qaeda’s best recruitment tool.
Everyone knows that we here at DoubleSpeak are big Kerry fans. Again he has shown himself to be a man of honor and integrity.
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