From what I have read of Kerry, he was probably solidly against going into Iraq. Temperamentally, Kerry is much like Colin Powell, extremely wary of committing the nation to military action. He is also not unlike his dad a liberal internationalist with realist sympathies; Like any good realist he is profoundly skeptical of political grand versions, but utterly lacking Kissinger’s Machiavellian ruthlessness.

There is simply no way Kerry would have undertaken a similar adventure had he been President. No way.

That said, he would have forsaw the bad consequences for the US’s Iraq policy of congress not authorizing the use of force and so voted yes.

However, during the primaries he stradled the fence by adopting Clark’s position and has stuck to that position since. As I have said, his public position was just pure spin.

Now, some people, mostly Republicans, seem to think that the spin originates with Kerry; I profoundly disagree. Democrats everywhere asked themselves what kind of background would the perfect candidate (i.e., a Democratic version of the mythical Republican tough on terrorism president) have and decided that Kerry, on paper at least, came closest to matching this ideal. John Kerry has also tried to conform to that ideal. The problem is the so called ideal candidate was never what inspired them, hatred of Bush did, and John Kerry’s inclinations do not not match his resume. To make matters worse, Democrats are micro managing Kerry to death and in so doing are making an already stiff candidate look even stiffer.

They did this with Gore as well. In the lead up to the debates the Democrats had Gore read out different answers to same question to a focus group. Whatever answers the focus group liked best they went with. More recently such focus group nonsense helped shape the entire Democratic convention, which by the way the pundits loved at the time because they hit on all the “right” points, but which left out the single element that ties the Democrats together, viz., hatred of Bush.