Kerry on mistakes

This goes along the lines of an earlier post on President Clinton's recent comments on Sen. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

Senator Kerry had some interesting things to say in this article in The Huffington Post yesterday:

Four years ago today, the United States Senate voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq.

There's nothing - nothing - in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close. We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution.

I'm glad he's finally saying this now; it's too bad he wasn't saying this during the 2004 election as many knew he should have.

And he had this to say about Iraq and its historical comparisons with the Vietnam War:

Today of all days, we should be having this debate, openly, honestly, and in a way that honors America's troops and our best traditions. One of the things I feel most personally is that a Congress that shares responsibility for getting us into Iraq needs to take responsibility for getting us out the right way.


The truth is that America is imprisoned in a failed policy. And as in Vietnam, we're being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory. Well, that too is a lie.

Next time you're in Washington, take a moment to walk down to the Vietnam War Memorial, if you haven't done it.

As you walk down that path into the center of the V and you stand in the V, you can look up one end and you'll see 1960 -- earlier, 1959 -- all the way through parts of 1968, and then the other side of the wall brings us toward the end. And half the names on that wall, half the names -- stand in the center of it and look up at tens of thousands of young Americans -- half the names on that wall were lost after America's leaders knew and later acknowledged our strategy wasn't working. It was immoral then and it is immoral now to be quiet or equivocal in the face of that kind of delusion. Just think about what that Wall might look like for this war.

The administration's self-proclaimed "students of history" should know this and accept it. What's the point of being a student of history, as Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld claim to be, if you don't learn anything from it.