Kerry campaign attacks President over ‘war honour he did not earn’

“After weeks of denigration of the Democratic challenger’s Vietnam war record, Mr Kerry’s backers have responded with allegations against the President - including the claim that he was once photographed in uniform wearing a medal ribbon he had not earned.

As polls showed that Mr Bush had edged ahead of Mr Kerry for the first time, a pro-Kerry organisation labelled the President an “impostor” over the photograph, taken in 1970 and discovered in his father’s Presidential Library in Houston, Texas.

The ribbon is an Air Force Outstanding Unit Award - which was not awarded to the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron in which Mr Bush served until 1975, five years after the photograph was taken, according to the group US War Report.

“Why is this fraud important? Because it betrays the Honour Code that every officer learns and carries throughout his or her career,” said Walt Starr who investigated the medals for the group. Separately a new book, Deserter, by Ian Williams, a British-born author, challenges the President with details of how he used his father’s influence to join the Texas Air National Guard as a trainee pilot, thereby avoiding service in Vietnam, and then allegedly disappeared from his base without fulfilling his duty.

“Bush has set himself up, and now that the issue is coming up he is going to have to answer questions on his own documented record,” said Williams.

Williams’s book offers evidence that Mr Bush stopped training in 1972, and failed to take an annual physical examination demanded of all pilots. Deserter also claims that Mr Bush failed to turn up for duty in Alabama, an omission which could have resulted in a charge of being absent without leave, or even desertion.

MoveOn.com, an independent organisation, has repeated the claim in television advertisements that Mr Bush abandoned his military post and the American media has taken up the story. “Alabama is where serious questions arise over whether or not Bush fulfilled his obligations to the Guard,” said William McTavish, a Republican, and editor of the Washington on-line political magazine Capitol Hill Blue.

Mr Bush has strongly denied abandoning his duties. He says he left his Texan unit after requesting transfer to Alabama, so that he could also work on a political campaign.

Asked about the medal ribbon, a White House spokesman said he could not respond until the record had been checked.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/29/wbush129.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/29/ixworld.html

Posted by: rdelephant at August 29, 2004 05:31 PM

An interesting article, but somewhat dated. FP rated Bush in July of 2003, at a time when it looked like the Iraq War was a big success. Now, after the fighting in Najaf, and with a large part of the country still in the hands of insurgents, I don’t expect he would get the same ratings.

More interesting than the stale opinions of the policy wonks is the question of whether the U.S. Army should be engaged in nation-building, something that Bush denounced repeatedly during the 2000 election campaign:

I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.

http://www.issues2000.org/2004/George_W__Bush_Foreign_Policy.htm

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 05:58 PM

Mr Kerry’s backers have responded with allegations against the President - including the claim that he was once photographed in uniform wearing a medal ribbon he had not earned.

ROTFLMAO!

Now I know Bush is going to win.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at August 29, 2004 07:07 PM

More interesting than the stale opinions of the policy wonks is the question of whether the U.S. Army should be engaged in nation-building, something that Bush denounced repeatedly during the 2000 election campaign:

Forrest,

Are you saying that you voted for Bush based on his stance against nation-building? Because I did. But I also understand that I was too trusting of the Clinton Administration.

9/11 was my wake up call.

Posted by: TexasGal at August 29, 2004 07:11 PM

Actually, I voted AGAINST Bush, mainly because he struck me as too inexperienced for the job. His performance to date has not caused me to alter that judgement.

On the issue of nation-building, it’s really complicated. In 2000, Bush criticized the mission in Somalia:

It started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. But in this case, it was a nation-building exercise. And same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.

http://www.issues2000.org/2004/George_W__Bush_Foreign_Policy.htm

Most of us agree that Somalia was a disaster. But the alternative to nation-building in a country that has no government isn’t clear. Powell warned Bush before the Iraq War:

“Powell says to him somewhat in a chilly way, ‘Are you aware of the consequences?’ because he’d been pounding for months on the president, on everyone — and Powell directly says, ‘You know you’re going to be owning this place.’

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_20-4-2004_pg4_2

My personal opinion: When you occupy a country, you become responsible for it, and you damn well better leave it in a better condition than you found it.

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 07:32 PM

My personal opinion: When you occupy a country, you become responsible for it, and you damn well better leave it in a better condition than you found it.

Well Forrest, I would agree with that. And GWB agrees with that also. As he has said, we will not abandon Iraq or Afghanistan. We will be there “not one minute longer” than needed.

Personally, I hold Clinton and his administration responsible for underestimating our enemy and knowing full well what resources we were lacking in order to defeat them and continuing to reduce our ability.

Tell me. What the hell was he thinking?

Posted by: TexasGal at August 29, 2004 07:54 PM

>>Tell me. What the hell was he thinking?

I cannot tell you what he thought, but I can tell you what he said:

Former President Clinton said he agreed with President Bush’s decision to confront Iraq about its potential weapons programs, but thought the administration erred in starting a war in 2003 rather than allowing United Nations weapons inspectors longer to carry out their work.

“In terms of the launching of the war, I believe we made an error in not allowing the United Nations to complete the inspections process,” Clinton told CBS News’s Dan Rather in a 60 Minutes interview to air tonight.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/iraq/2637192

Possibly, the inspections process would eventually have revealed what we subsequently learned, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It may also have crossed his mind that invading Iraq meant committing the United States to paying billions of dollars of foreign aid and tying up the better part of our army for years in a country where Americans are generally hated.

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 08:31 PM

Possibly, the inspections process would eventually have revealed what we subsequently learned, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Yep! I agree. Then Saddam would have been back in business!

Posted by: TexasGal at August 29, 2004 08:48 PM

What would have happened if we hadn’t invaded will never be known. However, the head of Iraq’s WMD program, when he defected in 1995, said that all WMD had been destroyed after the First Iraq War:

“There was no decision to use chemical weapons for fear of retaliation. We realized that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear. All chemical weapons were destroyed. They must have a revision of decision to start production. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, nuclear were destroyed.”

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf

No such “revision of decision” was ever made. There have been no WMD in Iraq in over a decade.

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 09:19 PM

Oh Forrest,

Do you put your trust in Saddam, a sworn enemy of the USA? Do you think that Saddam and his sons would have abandoned their quest to do us harm? Do you really believe that once they were free and clear of sanctions, they would have seen the light and turned over a new leaf? If so, I’d be interested in the evidence you have.

Were your grandchildren worth the risk of leaving Saddam in Iraq without sanctions?

I understand that we as Americans became oblivious to what Saddam was up to for the last 12 years, but his ability and activities that were revealed in David Kay’s report should raise the hair on the back of your neck.

We had been ignoring Saddam, just has we had been ignoring Osama for the last decade.

Same on us!

Posted by: TexasGal at August 29, 2004 09:35 PM

When you occupy a country, you become responsible for it, and you damn well better leave it in a better condition than you found it.

This is a very Jacksonian (Andrew) idea, one with which I agree, as do most Americans I’d bet. But you’ve hit upon the main difference between what Bush campaigned against in 2000 and what we’re undertaking today. Somalia and Haiti and Bosnia were nation-building projects for their own sake, not a moral debt incurred as part of the aftermath of war (true Jacksonian war, where defeat of the enemy is actually saught and achieved) like Iraq and Alfghanistan. Believe me, if Saddam’s or the Taliban’s failure wasn’t the result of the US deposing them, Bush wouldn’t have us anywhere near either of them.

Nation-building is an activity fraught with risk that fails more often than not. I can’t think of an example of success that came about without the builder first conquering the buildee and thus gaining, at least for a time, total political control of the project.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at August 29, 2004 09:36 PM

>>Do you put your trust in Saddam, a sworn enemy of the USA?

I trust him just as little as I trust N. Korea or Iran. I observe that N. Korea and Iran have active WMD programs, which Iraq has not had for more than a decade. I would suggest that, if there was a WMD threat to the United States, invading Iraq did very little to change that.

>>Somalia and Haiti and Bosnia were nation-building projects for their own sake, not a moral debt incurred as part of the aftermath of war . . .

These are very different cases: We took part in the U.N. mission in Somalia mainly because the (first) Bush administration came under public pressure due to numerous pictures of starving Somali children on television.

The Haitian intervention was the result of a 1991 coup which brought in a severely repressive government and sent an growing fleet of refugees in leaky boats sailing toward Florida.

In Bosnia, our intervention was the result of a failed U.N. policy. Worried about violence in the former Yugoslavia, the Europeans had repeatedly pressured us to join the U.N. peacekeeping force there. Both Bush Sr. and Clinton refused to send ground troops except as part of a heavily-armed force under NATO, not U.N. control. When the lightly-armed U.N. peacekeepers were taken hostage, it was plain to everyone that the U.N. had failed. The Europeans then agreed to the American terms. Faced with superior force, Serbian resistance collapsed immediately.

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 11:01 PM

trust him just as little as I trust N. Korea or Iran. I observe that N. Korea and Iran have active WMD programs, which Iraq has not had for more than a decade. I would suggest that, if there was a WMD threat to the United States, invading Iraq did very little to change that.

Then you trusted him to forget what he had already developed and used. And you ignore what Putin, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt .. among others.. told us about Saddam.

Posted by: TexasGal at August 29, 2004 11:09 PM

>>Then you trusted him to forget what he had already developed and used.

I would trust Saddam only to waste the national treasury on palaces and statues of himself. Everything else got short shrift: food and medicine for the Iraqi people, vital oil facilities and infrastructure, and, yes, the military:

“Its equipment stocks had also fallen disastrously low. In 1991 it had over 5,000 tanks, but in 2003, it had only 2,000; nearly 7,000 armored personnel carriers in 1991, in 2003 less than 2,000; self-propelled artillery equipment 500 in 1991, 150 in 2003; towed guns 3,000 in 1991, under 2,000 in 2003. Most of the Iraqi equipment, moreover, largely Soviet but some French in origin, was old, even antiquated; its T-55 tanks were a fifty-year-old model, worse than obsolete, actually death traps if pitted against modern Western tanks. Everything — tanks, personnel carriers, artillery pieces — lacked spare parts and was badly serviced.” — John Keegan, “The Iraq War,” p. 129.

>>And you ignore what Putin, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt .. among others.. told us about Saddam.

I would not trust any of them farther than I could throw them.

Posted by: Forrest at August 29, 2004 11:43 PM

“at a time when it looked like the Iraq War was a big success. “

Iraq is far closer to success now, with an interim Govt, a national conference and elections on track, than in July 2003.

“Now, after the fighting in Najaf,” … ahem, in which the forces of moderation, calling on an end to fighting, return of Najaf and Kufa to the Iraqi police forces, prevailed upon the smashed Mahdi army to withdraw and save face.

It is more clear now than ever that Iraq is indeed capable of democracy and Governance. The political center is calling on democratic and cooperative models of behavior. There is an emerging civil society. If we were to compare the Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, and Iraq experiences, the Iraqi experience is the one most successful … and the one where there is most at stake.

“There have been no WMD in Iraq in over a decade.”

False. Polish troops got a hold of a batch of cyclosarin-laden munitions. Sarin gas IEDs were found by our troops. And the ISG found biotoxins. Not stockpiles, but stuff was there.
Not to mention the many suspicious dual-use type chemicals.

Liberating Iraq

Posted by: Patrick at August 30, 2004 12:06 AM

“>>Do you put your trust in Saddam, a sworn enemy of the USA? I trust him just as little as I trust N. Korea or Iran. I observe that N. Korea and Iran have active WMD programs”

You really dont know that —- are you there? YOu are trusting on UN declarations and the very thin intel on the ground (IF ANY). We didnt know LIbya was developing nukes, until 2003 ….

Bush put together the Proliferation Security Initiative, a
multilateral effort to track down and stop the trafficking in WMDs.
That initiative busted the A.Q. Khan nuclear technology ring in 2003,
which was selling Pakistan’s nuclear weapons secrets to rogue regimes.

Cracking that case led us to Libya, which we discovered had their own nuclear weapons program.
Liberating Iraq and our knowledge of Libya’s WMD programs convinced Libyan leader Gadhafi to
give them up. He told Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi: “I will do whatever the Americans want
because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid”.

The lesson is this: Deposing Saddam Hussein and tracking down the nuclear weapons network has taken two rogue WMD nations, Libya and Iraq, off the table for the terrorists looking for lethal technology.

So, deposing Saddam Hussein did indeed advance our national security.

See:

What, me worry?
Those critics of the war who opposed our ‘strong resolve’ in Iraq, and that assume “negotiations” with rogue nations would work are learning the wrong lesson. They have a “What, me worry?” attitude about WMD threats and are confabulating a diplomatic record to explain what is better explained by dictator’s calculations of what will keep him in power. Good intelligence and Strong resolve combined saved us from facing a graver threat and challenge from a nuclear-armed Libya.

If intelligence was not good, we ought not condemn the strong resolve that was not at all part of the problem. The real lesson then is to improve our intelligence while we maintain a posture of strong resolve to face down emerging threats before they get worse.

Posted by: Patrick at August 30, 2004 12:12 AM

>>Iraq is far closer to success now, with an interim Govt, a national conference and elections on track, than in July 2003.

The government has little or no control over large areas of the country: the “Sunni Triangle” and Sadr City. The internim government is regarded as an occupational puppet government by millions of Iraqis.

>>Polish troops got a hold of a batch of cyclosarin-laden munitions.

Poland said in a statement from Iraq that “beyond doubt the shells were from the 1980-1988 period, of the type used against Kurds and during the Iraq-Iran war.” . . .

“Due to the deteriorated state of the rounds and small quantity of remaining agent, these rounds were determined to have limited to no impact if used by insurgents against Coalition Forces,” the statement said.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20040702_209.html

>>Sarin gas IEDs were found by our troops.

“The round was an old binary type requiring the mixing of two chemical components in separate sections of the cell before the deadly agent is produced,” Brig Gen Kimmitt said. “The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece.”

He said the dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as the homemade bomb is “limited”, and there were no casualties as a result of the blast, which occurred “a couple of days ago”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1218879,00.html

>>And the ISG found biotoxins. Not stockpiles, but stuff was there.

Bush and Powell contended Friday that the discovery is evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intent to stockpile weapons of mass destruction.

But the chief U.S. weapons inspector said the vial had been stored for safekeeping in an Iraqi scientist’s refrigerator since 1993 and offered no evidence that it had been used in a weapons program during the last decade.

http://www.theolympian.com/home/specialsections/War/20031004/115875.shtml

Is this why we went to war with Iraq?????

Posted by: Forrest at August 30, 2004 02:36 AM

If you watch what the French do you will get a clue about how things are going in Iraq.

Chirac will not call it a success. But he is silent about failure.

What do you suppose the silence of the barking dog mean?

Here is my take on the medal issue:

George Bush never called me “baby killer”.

—==—

Steal this sig:

There is a big difference between William Calley and John Kerry. William Calley is a proven war criminal. For John Kerry we only have his word as an officer and a gentleman.

What is the War Hero Afraid of?
Form 180. Release ALL the records.

The Ads: Video links

Posted by: M. Simon at August 30, 2004 04:22 AM

Forrest asks,

Why did we go to war with Iraq?

To be closer to Iran (logistically).

As a military expert of the first order I’m taking your question as rhetorical. As a qualified military reader of maps I have no doubt you are pulling our legs for ammusement.

I got a chuckle. Thanks!

—==—

Steal this sig:

George Bush never called me “baby killer”.

There is a big difference between William Calley and John Kerry. William Calley is a proven war criminal. For John Kerry we only have his word as an officer and a gentleman.

What is the War Hero Afraid of?
Form 180. Release ALL the records.

The Ads: Video links

Posted by: M. Simon at August 30, 2004 04:28 AM

Forrest,

Since when is no casualties a a measure of danger or proof of non-existance?

Does that mean if my car won’t start it doesn’t exist?

Does it mean we have to perform quality control on the opposition’s weapons before we decide if his having them is a risk?

Are you insane? (plead the 5th)

—==—

Steal this sig:

George Bush never called me “baby killer”.

There is a big difference between William Calley and John Kerry. William Calley is a proven war criminal. For John Kerry we only have his word as an officer and a gentleman.

What is the War Hero Afraid of?
Form 180. Release ALL the records.

The Ads: Video links

Posted by: M. Simon at August 30, 2004 04:36 AM

Saddam Hussein, and his sons, could be depended upon to do in the future whatever they thought would increase and or protect their power. True sons of nature, they obeyed the Law of the Jungle—Might makes right—in every thing they did.

In an interview following the Gulf War of 1990, Saddam was asked what he thought his biggest mistake was. He answered that it was invading Kuwait before he had finished developing nuclear weapons.

It’s the Frog and the Scorpion, Forrest. It’s just what they are (or in the case of Uday and Qusay, what they were).

In a post 9/11 world, the idea that the US would have made it through the next 20 years without a military confrontation with the Hussein regime outrageous, really, making the only question left is whether we were going to engage them on their terms or ours, before the Horrible Aftermath or afterwards.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at August 30, 2004 01:04 PM