KERRY is spewing the SAME SPEECHES he spread in 1971 , only this time its about Iraq instead of NAM. What a stinking TRAITOR this slug is.
If I didn't know better, I'd believe that all he did was cross out the word "Vietnam" and insert "Iraq" in its place.
Like I said earlier... the more he and edwards speak the more they sound like traitors.
"KERRY is spewing the SAME SPEECHES he spread in 1971 , only this time its about Iraq instead of NAM. What a stinking TRAITOR this slug is."
Agreed. Isn't this ironic? I mean this guy was in the Senate all these years and no one, except those ignorant ones in Mass. new thr truth about this guy.
No doubt that he is having a negative effect on the war. He's tying Bush's hands until the election, otherwise Fallujah et al would have been flattened weeks ago..
nick
I wondered what it would look like if I took John Kerry's 1971 Congressional Testimony and replaced a few words to make the testimony about Iraq. I was curious to see how much it resembled his recent (NYU) speeches on Iaq. Here is the result:
1971 2004
STATEMENT OF JOHN KERRY, VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST ABOUT THE WAR IN IRAQ
[NOTE: These are excerpts from John Kerry's 1971 Congressional Testimony. However, I have replaced Vietnam with Iraq, Vietnamese with Iraqis, Viet Cong or VC with Insurgents, communism with terrorism, communist with terrorist,and rice paddies with oil fields. Those are the only changes.]
Feelings of Men Coming Back from Iraq
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Iraq. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran [of Vietnam] and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
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In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in Iraq, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Iraq or Afganistan by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We are probably much more angry than that and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here. I know that all of you talk about every possible alternative of getting out of Iraq. We understand that. We know you have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Iraq and about the mystical war against terrorism.
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Insurgents or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those oil fields for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Iraq ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Insurgent terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Insurgents.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly an Abu Ghraib and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Muslims.
We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "muslim human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the Inusrgents because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Falujahs and Najafs and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Iraqizing the Iraqi. Each day- (Applause)
The Chairman: I hope you won't interrupt. He is making a very significant statement. Let him proceed.
Mr. Kerry: Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Iraq someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to dies so that President Bush won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Iraq? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is terrorism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the terrorists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight terrorism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.
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We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Iraq now.
Extent of Problem of Iraq War
We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in Iraq. That is what we are trying to say. It is party and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation al Alcataz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Iraq and he said "My God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people." And he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and so many others.
And he's just as correct now as then.
Why anyone in their right mind could vote for this idiot is beyond me.