Kerry's been consistent about his nuances, at least

[papau]

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040811/6441973s.htm

Kerry's been consistent about his nuances, at least
By Walter Shapiro

<snip>That's why it was not surprising that John Kerry insisted Monday that, even with the benefit of hindsight, he still would have supported the 2002 congressional resolution giving George W. Bush authority to invade Iraq. ''Yes, I would have voted for the authority,'' the Democratic nominee said while campaigning at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. ''I believe it was the right authority for the president to have.''

Campaigning on Tuesday in Pensacola, Fla., the president eagerly pounced on Kerry's remarks. ''After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility,'' Bush declared, ''Sen. Kerry now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believe were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.''

Bush, of course, will never be accused of pulling a Romney. Even now, as he asserted in Pensacola that ''Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction,'' he glides over the evidence that suggests America invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence. And Bush has never acknowledged that the administration's plans for postwar Iraq seemed more in the spirit of Pollyanna than cold-eyed realism.

As for Kerry, Saddam's purported weapons of mass destruction were never advanced as the deciding factor in the senator's prewar explanations of why he favored confronting Iraq. In a September 2002 article written for the editorial pages of The New York Times, Kerry stated that ''the unrestrained threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein is unacceptable.'' Then he pointedly added that Saddam's ''refusal to allow in (weapons) inspectors is in blatant violation of the United Nations 1991 cease-fire agreement that left him in power.''

After the October 2002 Senate vote, Kerry amplified his thinking in a speech at Georgetown University in January 2003. ''The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real,'' Kerry acknowledged, ''but it is not new. It has been with us since the end of the Persian Gulf War.'' Kerry went on to argue that ''the burden is also on the Bush administration to do the hard work of building a broad coalition at the U.N. and the necessary work of educating America about the rationale for war.''<snip>