Kerry voices deep regret for voting for Iraq war

[Mass]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/10/12/kerry_voices_deep_regret_for_voting_for_iraq_war/

Kerry voices deep regret for voting for Iraq war
Blog post aimed at firming up his antiwar image

By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | October 12, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Four years to the day after voting to authorize war in Iraq, Senator John F. Kerry yesterday asserted that the vote is his greatest regret of his political career, and said all lawmakers who voted for the war should admit that it was a mistake.

``There's nothing -- nothing -- in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close," Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote in a dispatch on the liberal blog HuffingtonPost.com. ``We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution."

Twenty-nine Senate Democrats joined all but one of the Senate's Republicans in approving the war resolution Oct. 11, 2002. Other prominent Democrats -- including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of Kerry's possible 2008 presidential rivals -- have not repudiated their votes.

Throughout his 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry said he would not have changed his vote to authorize force to topple Saddam Hussein. His struggles to articulate his position on the war epitomized his difficulty in communicating his campaign message.

...
In his blog entry, Kerry urged readers to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, which has the names of more than 58,000 US troops killed in battle. ``Half the names on that wall were lost after America's leaders knew and later acknowledged our strategy wasn't working," Kerry wrote. ``It was immoral then and it is immoral now to be quiet or equivocal in the face of that kind of delusion. Just think about what that Wall might look like for this war."

A good article in the Globe concerning Kerry's article on Iraq.

After having seen the answers by some on the kerry blog continuing to argue his vote was the right one after Kerry said he was the wrong one,

I have two questions for some people here and elsewhere that refuse to agree that it was THE WRONG VOTE:

1/ Do you think this vote was right? (I am not talking about whether Kerry would have gone to war whether he was president or not, but whether the vote was right, and, in this case, why was Kennedy's and Durbin's vote wrong?).

2/ It seems to me that Kerry's admission that his vote was "a vote he regrets" and that he is ready to recognize that and do something to correct that places him in a morally superior position to those who refuse to say their votes were wrong. (surprisingly, the globe seems to argue or at least to see the point). I cannot figure out why some insist to contradict what he says and to minimize the argument that HE IS MAKING. Can somebody explain the strategy to me? Rehashing the same stories will not help. If other people react the way I do, it could actually make Kerry less attractive.

I know each of us has his own sensibility, but I had to rant after having seen the beautiful post on the Kerry blog. I really do not understand the points that were made.

BTW, the post is excellent.