John Kerry Reminds Congress Benjamin Netanyahu Supported U.S. Invasion of Iraq – Apparently Forgetting He Did, Too – UPDATED

[This is an extended update of a post from earlier today.]

Next week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make a speech before Congress in which he is expected to oppose the reported terms of the nuclear agreement that the U.S. and Iran are getting close to finalizing.  Ahead of that speech, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu by noting he had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003:

“The prime minister, as you will recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush, and we all know what happened with that decision.”

What Secretary Kerry seems to have forgotten, however, is that he, Vice President Joe Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all supported the invasion, too.  All three of them voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.  But then, I guess you can say Secretary Kerry was for the war before he was against it.

UPDATE (2/26/2015 4:15 pm):  I wanted to comment a little more on Secretary of State Kerry’s warning yesterday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had, in 2002, when he was a private citizen, urged Congress to support a possible invasion of Iraq and, in Secretary Kerry’s words, “we all know what happened with that decision.”

What I wanted to comment on was how easily Secretary Kerry forgets or ignores his own support for the Authorization to Use Military Force Against Iraq in 2002.¹  It is as if he really didn’t want to vote for it (after all, he voted against the 1991 resolution that President George H.W. Bush sought for the Gulf War).  It’s as is the proper Democratic/progressive view (at least now) is that the Iraq War was bad – and always was bad – and that showing that somebody supported it, shows how poor their thinking is.

Secretary Kerry treats his support for the 2002 AUMF, assuming he even thinks about it, as something to be ignored.  Maybe it was forced on him by politics.  Maybe he trusted George W. Bush when he shouldn’t have.  (See Josh Marshall’s post footnoted above.)  In any case, he didn’t really mean it, and he changed back to what is now the default Democratic/progressive position on the Iraq War as soon as he could.  And from that point on, it was as if he always opposed it.

Secretary Kerry’s approach is in contrast to that to that of Brent Scowcroft.  Jacob Heilbrunn has an interesting article on General Scowcroft, and a new biography of him, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security, in The National Interest.  Contra to Secretary Kerry, Brent Scowcroft opposed the invasion of Iraq, writing an op-ed to that effect in The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2002.

The bigger difference between General Scowcroft and Secretary Kerry, however, is that, once we invaded Iraq and things started going badly, Secretary Kerry turned against the war.  General Scowcroft took the opposite approach.  He didn’t think we should invade, but once we did, he worked to make the decision turn out okay.  In August of 2003, General Scowcroft wrote another op-ed, this one in The Washington Post, saying that, now that we were in Iraq, we needed to succeed.  In that same vein, in February 2007, he supported the surge in testimony before Congress.

Two approaches.  Support something and then abandon the effort as soon as you can and the politics switches.  Or oppose it but then, if your position is not followed, work to help the policy that is adopted succeed.
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¹ Josh Marshall at TPM explains why then-Senator Kerry wasn’t really supporting the war in Iraq with his vote in October 2002.  I will leave it to you as to whether he succeeds.