Kerry on the IWR Vote

Imus asked Kerry about his vote on the IWR. Kerry provided an answer consistent with his several previous answers (which I’ve discussed many times, including here).

IMUS: “Back on the original vote for the Iraq war, if you’d had voted your conscience instead of the way you did vote — No, a serious question, knowing what you know now, would you still have voted to authorize the president to go?”

SEN. KERRY: “Obviously not. No way. And I said during the campaign. I said it’s the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. I said — look, I think everybody has made it clear that at the time, given the information that we were given, I believe it was the right vote. It was a vote based on seven-and-a-half years of destroying weapons of mass destruction, and then we lost the inspectors. We had a two-year period of no inspectors, even though we’d been destroying weapons for seven-and-a-half years, and the CIA tells you, he’s got weapons. I think it was the right vote. If I’d been president, I’d have wanted that power. But the president said he was going to do meticulous planning. He said he would exhaust the remedies of the inspections and the U.N., and he said he would go to the war as a last resort. He broke every one of those promises. And everything, every step of the way — you just listen to Colin Powell, who tells you, there was a small cabal run by Dick Cheney and people in the White House. They captured the policy. They didn’t even look at the State Department plans for the post-war period. I went to Georgetown University in January of 2003, and I said, Mr. President, do not rush to war. The difficult part is not winning the ground war, it’s winning the peace. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”