Kerry Gives a Direct Answer
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Kerry Gives a Direct Answer
| Tue, 08-10-2004 - 12:06am |
and it's not one the anti-war left will like:
'Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.
Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: "I'll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority.' http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/381249|top|08-09-2004::17:46|reuters.html
Renee ~~~

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Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: “Well, the reconstruction costs remain a very -- an issue for the future. And Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a rather wealthy country. Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: “This is not Afghanistan…When we approach the question of Iraq, we realize here is a country which has a resource. And it’s obvious, it’s oil. And it can bring in and does bring in a certain amount of revenue each year…$10, $15, even $18 billion…this is not a broke country.”
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “If you the cost, the money, Iraq is a very different situation from Afghanistan…Iraq has oil. They have financial resources.”
State Department Official Alan Larson: “On the resource side, Iraq itself will rightly shoulder much of the responsibilities. Among the sources of revenue available are $1.7 billion in invested Iraqi assets, the found assetsin Iraq…and unallocated oil-for-food money that will be deposited in the development fund.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “I don't believe that the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction, in a sense… funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things, including the Oil for Food, which has a very substantial number of billions of dollars in it.
http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/iraqquotes_web.htm
Richard Perle: Well, first of all, Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will. The Iraqis are enormously talented.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/saddam/transcript3.html
He observed that Iraq could not rely on its oil revenues alone to rebuild its decrepit infrastructure but must plan to develop industries like tourism that would benefit from national and historic treasures like the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon.
"Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved, and I think that will be resolved as the Iraqis take over more and more responsibility for their own government," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "In the last analysis, they have to create an environment that's hospitable to investment and to enterprise."
Sec. Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 9, 2003 (not before the war, I'll grant you...but pretty flagrently violating Powell's Pottery Barn rule, huh.) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/international/middleeast/11MILI.html?ex=1092283200&en=b08b651505ba67b0&ei=5070&pagewanted=all
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
Renee ~~~>
Kerry Says He would add 40,000 to Army
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11971-2004Jun3.html
Kerry proposes terms for troop withdrawal
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/07-04/07-16-04/a01wn835.htm
In July, the Senate voted to increase the standing army by 20,000, a move which the Bush administration was against. Why is Bush against increasing the size of the army? A Whitehouse spokesman says "A mandatory increase would lack flexibility and could leave troop levels higher than needed." Huh? Why do we have tens of thousands of our National Guard's people deployed indefinately in Iraq if we're in danger of having too many people in the Army?
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_army_061804,00.html
Here's an interesting read about the size of the army:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june04/army_1-13.html
Here is an interesting article that may shed some light on a lot of these issues.
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I was being facecious. Bush did exactly what he said he'd do, and most of the reconstruction isn't damage from the war, but 15 years of Saddam's neglect & destruction.
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That's not the conclusion of many including the 911 Commission.
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For the 4, 576 time. It was one of the reasons. Saddam's link to international terrorism was the primary concern, and based on the intelligence that was available, Bush was right to assume the worst about WMDs.
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Sorry, that's just not the case. Many reasons were enumerated both before & after the war. The WMD issue was important to help Tony Blair with his domestic support, but in the US, debate, it was never the sole or primary reason.
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Actually the number of
Renee ~~~
And here's what most Democrats don't seem to get about Kerry (or choose to pretend they don't get)-that version of the story is nothing more than revisionist history. All of Congress were just as anxious to jump into Iraq and declare themselves military conquerers as the President was-until things didn't go quite as well as planned, and so the rationalizing and backpedaling began. Kerry himself has been quoted as saying that even if we did not get the UN's approval we still needed to go in alone. That statement seems to have conveniently slipped his mind. It's not that we Republicans don't "get" it-it's that we don't take every stump speech we hear as the gospel truth.
Alicia,
"So he used his vote as propaganda against a tax cut he didn't want to see."
I'm not sure that I would
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