Bush vs Kerry: Ganó Kerry

**>** Well, you know when I talked about the $87 billion I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?
**>** What I think troubles a lot of people in our country is that the president has just sort of described one kind of mistake. But what he has said is that even knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction, even knowing there was no imminent threat, even knowing there was no connection of Al Qaeda, he would still have done everything the same way. Those are his words.
**>** First of all, we all know that in his State of the Union message he told Congress about nuclear materials that didn’t exist. We know that he promised America that he was going to build this coalition. I just described the coalition. It is not the kind of coalition we were described when we were talking about voting for this. The president said he would exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and go through that full process. He didn’t. He cut it off, sort or arbitrarily. And we know that there were further diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards.
Now he misled the American people in his speech when he said we will plan carefully. They obviously didn’t.
He misled the American people when he said we’d go to war as a last resort. We did not go as a last resort. And most Americans know the difference.
Now this has cost us deeply in the world. I believe that it is important to tell the truth to the American people. I’ve worked with those leaders the president talks about. I’ve worked with them for 20 years, for longer than this president. And I know what many of them say today and I know how to bring them back to the table.
And I believe that a fresh start, new credibility, a president who can understand what we have to do to reach out to the Muslim world to make it clear that this is not – you know, Osama bin Laden uses the invasion of Iraq in order to go out to people and say America has declared war on Islam.
We need to be smarter about how we wage a war on terror. We need to deny them the recruits. We need to deny them the safe havens. We need to rebuild our alliances.
**>** I wasn’t misleading when I said he was a threat. Nor was I misleading on the day that the president decided to go to war when I said that he had made a mistake in not building strong alliances and that I would have preferred that he did more diplomacy.
I’ve had one position, one consistent position: that Saddam Hussein was a threat, there was a right way to disarm him and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way.
**>** The president just said, extraordinarily revealing and, frankly, very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq he just said, the enemy attacked us. Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaeda attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s No. 1 criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who only, a week earlier, had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other. That’s the enemy that attacked us, that’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries with stronger recruits.
He also said Saddam Hussein would have been stronger. That is just factually incorrect. Two-thirds of the country was a no-fly zone when we started this war. We would have had sanctions. We would have had the U.N. inspectors. Saddam Hussein would have been continually weakening. If the president had shown the patience to go through another round of resolution, to sit down with those leaders, say, What do you need? What do you need now? How much more will it take to get you to join us? We’d be in a stronger place today.
**>** Thirty-five to 40 countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons at the moment the president invaded than Saddam Hussein. And while he’s been diverted with 9 out of 10 active duty divisions of our army, either going to Iraq, coming back from Iraq or getting ready to go, North Korea has gotten nuclear weapons and the world is more dangerous. Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons. And the world is more dangerous. Darfur has a genocide. The world is more dangerous. I’d have made a better choice.