John Kerry Attacks Bush Over Iraq Policies
June 2nd, 2006 @ 10:07 pm
The L.A. Times reports on John Kerry’s speech to the Pacific Council yesterday here in Los Angeles. As I reported here earlier today, a group of bloggers (aka Bloogers) from the L.A. area also attended the speech.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) harshly criticized the Bush administration for “disdaining diplomacy” in favor of a confrontational and unilateral foreign policy that has hurt the United States’ standing around the world and made it less safe.
In a speech Thursday in Los Angeles, the former (and perhaps future) Democratic Party presidential candidate warned that the mistakes of Iraq must not be repeated in the current standoff with Iran.
“War is the ultimate failure of diplomacy,” Kerry told a gathering of the Pacific Council on International Policy. “Yet our current leadership has arrogantly discarded this basic principle…. All too often they disdained diplomacy as little more than an inconvenient detour on the chosen path to armed conflict.”
The result, he said, was an ill-advised rush to war in Iraq that alienated other governments and diminished sympathy for the U.S. generated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. America’s current isolation, and the presence of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, is “playing right into Iranian hands…. The Iranians are delighted,” Kerry said.
MORE & LINKS -
http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=3175