So let's go through Kerrey's editorial and separate out the lies contained herewith.
The first offense is the editorial's title, which in fairness the former Senator may or may not have chosen: "The Left's Iraq Muddle". First off, any time you here a pundit or politician refer to the "Left", you know an effort is underfoot to smear and marginalize a sizable chunk of the American population for not adhering to the Bush administration's line of reasoning. In this case, he is referring to Americans who are exhibiting "muddled" thinking because they don't support the continued occupation of Iraq even though a majority of Americans believe we should set clear timetables for withdrawal, making it amazingly disingenuous to say this is a problem solely with the "Left".
In his opening salvo, Kerrey condemns "the Left" for criticizing the neoconservatives' attempts to impose "democracy" in the Middle East by using military force. He reminds us that "those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently." To compare the Iraq invasion with World War II demonstrates a flagrant disregard for history - or a willingness to distort it in order to score political points.
Kerrey then argues that "The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were "over there." It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the "head of the snake." But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores."
His conflation of al Qaeda's 9/11 terrorist attacks with Iraq's supposed "threat" to the US is pretty glaring in its logical inconsistency and lack of supporting evidence. He also states that "Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before", again without backing up this fantastic claim with any evidence.
He complains that "The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart."
It is interesting to note that Kerrey is not so subtly saying that those who didn't support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein are "supporting dictatorships." Why then, does he not point out the fact that the US is currently - by his definition - supporting many dictatorships in the Middle East such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait as well as support for China? To say this is about confronting dictatorship completely ignores the very anti-democrstic principles by which US foreign policy operates.
Next, Kerrey writes that "liberals" who believe we should have done nothing in the face of this supposed threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11 are the reason "Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power." Apparently taking over both chambers of Congress doesn't count as being trusted with policymaking authority.
According to our author:
The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically, "yes."
But as Kerrey later acknowledges, it is only the "primary battleground" with radical Islamists because the US invaded Iraq, not the other way around. The real battleground should really be in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where most of the key al Qaeda leadership is still believed to be operating from.
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