Senator John F. Kerry told reporters that he will vote for President Bush's new $81.9 billion funding request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Previously, Kerry voted for a failed version of a separate $87 billion request, but against the final version, inspiring his immortal gaffe, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Clarifying his nuanced position, Kerry said his vote against the earlier bill had been "the right vote at the right time" on a war he previously described as "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" -- a war from which he, as President, would have withdrawn troops as soon as possible.
Now, however, times have changed:
"I think we're in a very different situation," Kerry told reporters. "I'm going to vote for this ... I think this money is important to our being successful and to the completion of the process."Better progress since January 20? That seems like a tall order, given that Iraq successfully held its first free elections in decades on January 30. And wasn't Kerry going to pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, anyway?
...Kerry said the United States would have made better progress on Iraq, where an insurgency continues to rage almost two years after the March 2003 invasion, if he had been elected.
He asserted the Bush administration was only now "trying some of the things" he proposed such as focusing on training Iraqi forces and getting other countries involved.Well, if you bet every number on the roulette wheel, one of them is bound to win.
"I think my security proposals for the country were smack on, dead on," Kerry said.
Nice of him to straighten all that out.
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