RUSH: We had over 30 in this invasion of Iraq, over 30 countries had sent military assets of one form or another. But here you have it. The one thing that we can with relative assuredness say that Senator Kerry is consistent on, the one thing is his love for the UN. His desire to subordinate U.S. foreign policy and defense to the UN. Here, 14 years ago, Senator Kerry wanted the first Gulf War run entirely under the auspices of the UN. Five years later in 1994 Senator Kerry said on CNN that American soldiers “would die with honor” if they died under the UN flag. If they died under the American flag “in unilateral action,”they would not be considered in his mind to have died with honor. The one thing we can count on with Senator Kerry is, he puts the United Nations above the United States when it comes to matters of foreign policy and our national defense and security and you can make book on that.
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RUSH: I just played for you Kerry telling Jim Baker in a debate at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1990 he wanted the UN to totally run the first Gulf War. Here is the sound bite, January 11th, 1991, of Kerry voting
KERRY 1991: I’m willing to accept the horror that goes with war when the interests or the stakes warrant it. But my belief through every fiber of my body, Mr. President, is that our impatience with sanctions and diplomacy does not yet warrant accepting that horror — and my fear is that our beloved country is not yet ready for what it will witness and bear if we go to this war. The question of being ready and certain is important to many of us of the Viet’ Naaaam generation. We come to this debate with a measure of distrust, with some skepticism, with a searing commitment to ask honest questions, and with a resolve to get satisfactory answers so that we are not misled again. I might add that I also come to this debate determined that whatever happens here, we will not confuse a war with the warriors. I am determined that our troops will receive complete and total support and that if we do go to war, Mr. President, I am committed that we do everything in our power to accomplish our mission with minimum casualties and to bring the troops home to the gratitude and to the respect that they will deserve. There is a rush to war here. There’s a rush to have this thing over with.
RUSH: Yeah, what did it take, 200-and-some-odd days, Senator Kerry? You weren’t for it then. You wanted sanctions. You want negotiations. You wanted diplomacy — the kind of thing that would have allowed Saddam to get a foothold in Kuwait. It’s the same old, same old, ladies and gentlemen. Here now is John Kerry from October 8th, 2002, as we fast forward almost ten years. Here he explains his vote for the war in Iraq this time. Here he explains Saddam’s a threat by outlawing all the weapons of mass destruction programs that
KERRY 2002: I believe that with respect to Sa’dam Hussein and the threat that he presents, we must ask ourselves a simple question. Why? It’s clear that in the four years since the UNSCOM inspectors were forced out, Sa’dam Hussein has continued his quest for weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence reports show that Iraq has invested more heavily in its biological weapons programs over the last four years with the result that key aspects of this program — R&D, production and weaponization — are active. Most elements of the program are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War. Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing, weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles, such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives which could bring them to the United States itself. Since inspectors left, the Iraqi regime has energized its missile program, probably now consisting of a few dozen scud-type missiles with ranges of 650 to 900 kilometers that could hit Israel, Saudi Arabia or other U.S. allies in the region. In addition, we know they are developing unmanned, aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents which could threaten their neighbors as well as American forces in the gulf.
RUSH: What’s the difference in that bite, October 8th, 2002, and his bite from back in 1990? The difference is he wasn’t running for president in 1990. He was running for president in October of 2002. He hadn’t announced it of course but we could put two and two together. But did you hear him put George Bush’s name in there at all? “George Bush saaaaays” and “the intelligence aaaaaagencies tell meeeee…”? No, you don’t hear any of that. This is John Kerry saying affirmatively: “The dangers posed by Saddam Hussein…” Now he seeks via hindsight, he wants the opportunity to pretend he never said any of this. No, only George Bush said this, but he, John Kerry? He never said any of this! Bush misled. Bush lied. John Kerry was on the same page at one time, ladies and gentlemen.
But since he’s just a senator, not the president, he has the benefit of hindsight. He can rework his views and repackage them and get away with ignoring what he had said previously because what he said previously didn’t matter a whit. He wasn’t president when he said it. Yet George W. Bush has not taken the opportunity to revise and extend his remarks. He has stayed consistent from Day One on the nature of the threat we face. It is John Kerry flip-flopping all over the place. It is John Kerry today taking, as fact, a fraudulent story in the New York Times yesterday, about explosives at Al Qaqaa ammo dump, which were not there in April of 2003 when we got there.
They were not pilfered under our watch. Senator Kerry can continue to attack the credibility and competence of the U.S. military, which was supposedly guarding these explosives. But in truth, it’s the United Nations that allowed this stuff to vanish. The UN was there in January, their inspectors. They were filing reports. CNN has the details of that on their website. We dug it up. So if something happened to these explosives, we think we know what it is. Logic guided by experience and our intelligence would tell us that Iraq moved the explosives and whatever else was in that dump themselves, while the UN noticed or didn’t.
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Headline: Inspectors Revisit Baghdad Site
Source: CNN
Date: Friday, January 24, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq –U.N. weapons inspectors returned Friday to Iraq’s massive al QaQaa complex, a site they’ve visited every day for the past week and a dozen times since restarting weapons inspections last year.
And with the United States firmly engaged in shoring up support for a possible military action against Iraq, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s son Uday warned that the Sept. 11 terror attacks “will look like a joke” if Iraq is attacked.
Just three days before a report of the inspectors’ findings is due at the U.N. Security Council, a team left its hotel for al QaQaa, a site south of Baghdad in Yousefiya that had been used by Iraq’s nuclear program for the production of high explosive lenses, detonators and propellants for nuclear weapons.
The site belongs to the Iraqi Military Industrialization Commission and was listed on a dossier of weapons of mass destruction facilities released by the British government last year.
The British dossier, released in September, alleged that parts of a phosgene production plant at al QaQaa had been rebuilt after being dismantled under U.N. supervision in the 1990s. Phosgene, the dossier said, has industrial uses, but “can also be used by itself as a chemical agent or as a precursor for nerve agent.”
With several of its allies — notably Germany and France — backing away from a military confrontation, the United States insisted it had solid evidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, President Bush’s top arms control diplomat, said Friday in Japan that such evidence would be revealed “at an appropriate time.”
“We have very convincing evidence that Iraq maintains an extensive program for the production and weaponization of weapons of mass destruction and long range ballistic missiles,” Bolton said in Japan during the third and last stop of a tour of Asia.
Bolton stopped short of saying the evidence makes irrelevant the inspectors’ report expected at the United Nations Monday
“The issue before the Security Council and international community now is not what the inspectors have found, or not found,” he said. “The issue is whether Iraq is in compliance with the long string of Security Council resolutions requiring that its weapons of mass destruction be eliminated.”
Meanwhile, Saddam’s son Uday, speaking on a television station he owns, issued an ominous warning to the United States.
“If they use air strikes against us, then what happened on Sept. 11, it will look like a joke,” he said. “They will know the real price they are going to pay.”
“We will be victorious and victory will be on our side.”
But Uday Hussein also said he believes that ultimately the United States and Iraq will take seats at the negotiating table because the United States respects strength and Iraq is the most stable regime in the region.
And with the clock ticking on weapons inspections and the Bush administration’s patience, Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council — the country’s highest lawmaking body — issued new laws calling for the death penalty for anyone convicted of armed robbery during wartime and 10 to 15 years in prison for falsifying military papers.
— CNN Correspondent Nic Robertson and Producer Ingrid Formanek contributed to this report.
