Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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The liar

By: trevino · Section: Democrats

John Kerry, speaking to the United States Senate, 9 October 2002 --

America wants the U.N. to be an effective organization that helps keep the peace. And that is why we are urging the Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough, immediate requirements. Because of my concerns, and because of the need to understand, with clarity, what this resolution meant, I traveled to New York a week ago. I met with members of the Security Council and came away with a conviction that they will indeed move to enforce, that they understand the need to enforce, if Saddam Hussein does not fulfill his obligation to disarm.
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John Kerry, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, 3 December 2003 --

Thanks to some friends in New York, I was invited to come up and meet with the Security Council in the week prior to the vote, and I wanted to do that, because I valued my vote. And I wanted to know what the real readiness and willingness of our partners was to take this seriously.
So I sat with the French and British, Germans, with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.
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John Kerry, speaking to the Boston Globe, 10 December 2003 --

I spent a lot of time before the vote looking at this issue. I went up to the United Nations at the request of some friends. And I met with the entire Security Council in a room just like this at a table like this. I spent two hours with them. (inaudible), just me and the Security Council, asking them questions. The French ambassador, "Is there a time when President Chirac would be ready to come on board? What do we need to do to move the French people to a place where they understand the stakes? Are you prepared to spend money? Do you believe we might have to use force in order to disarm Saddam Hussein? At what point would you be ready to do that?" I went through that with all of them.
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John Kerry, speaking to campaign rallies as reported in the New Yorker, 19 July 2004 --

Because I might well have been in Iraq if Saddam had stiffed the U.N., continued to not allow inspections, hidden things. But I would have brought other countries to the point of impatience with him. Then they would have been there with us. And the President could have done that. I know it because I spent the time to go up and meet with Security Council representatives. I talked to them at great length prior to the vote....I came away convinced that they were serious, that the resolutions did mean something, that they saw it as a moment for the U.N. to stand up for itself.
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John Kerry, speaking to the Unity: Journalists of Color Conference, 5 August 2004 --

I believe in my heart of hearts and in my gut that this president fails that test in Iraq. And I know this because I personally, and others, were deeply involved in the effort with other countries to bring them to the table.
I met with the Security Council of the United Nations in the week proceeding the vote in the Senate. I voted to hold Saddam Hussein accountable because, had I been president, I would have wanted that authority, because that was the way to enforce the U.N. resolutions and be tough with the prospect of his development of weapons of mass destruction.
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John Kerry, speaking to the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, 26 September 2004 --

At the time, I said and I supported the president, but I said look, you ought to take an extra period of time, if the French have some reservations, let’s put it on the table. Let’s have a U.N. Security Council meeting. I met with the security council personally one week before the vote, and I asked the French ambassador and the British and the Germans and the others, ‘What are you prepared to do?’ And all of them said they were prepared to stand up and enforce the resolutions of the United Nations, but they wanted the time to do it properly.
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John Kerry, speaking to the American people in the second debate, 8 October 2004 --

I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable.

I came away convinced that, if we worked at it, if we were ready to work and letting Hans Blix do his job and thoroughly go through the inspections, that if push came to shove, they'd be there with us.
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Every one of these statements is a lie. And, pace those on left and right who spent the weekend dreaming up world-shattering scenarios and are suffering from consequent anticlimax, this matters. Read on.

Posted On: Oct 25th, 2004: 01:47:23, Rated: 5.00/1


The pattern of quotes and representations is systematic, longstanding, and clear. John Kerry has invested substantial time and effort into promulgating the notion that he met with the Security Council of the United Nations -- either explicitly or sub rosa, all members of the Security Council -- just prior to the United States Senate's 11 October 2002 vote on the Iraq war resolution. (Note, by the bye, that the Kerry campaign itself tried to push the lie that the Senator met with the entire Security Council -- until forced to back down by Mowbray's fact-checking.) The reasons for the creation and dissemination of this myth are clear enough:

John Kerry wants to demonstrate his ability to work with foreign leaders.

John Kerry wants to relate the respect in which he is held -- he summoned the entire Security Council -- by foreign leaders.

John Kerry wants to buttress his case, however false it is, that he can induce foreign leaders to cooperate with him -- as here, so too in Iraq.

John Kerry wants to provide an ancedote on his superior perspicacity when it comes to divining the nature and intentions of foreign leaders.

John Kerry needs an anecdotal circumstance to explain why he's pro-war and anti-war all at once.

And so, the little self-serving lie, trotted out at regular intervals: harmless to the teller until exposed. Count this one as exposed. Make no mistake -- this lie of Kerry's is exposed as such, and as a lie rather than one of the many exaggerations to which the man is infamously prone. ("I personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, and razed the UN Security Council in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.") Joel Mowbray and the Washington Times are bound by the honorable conventions of honorable journalists, and so can only report that which is openly sourced and on the record. Bless them for it.
I'm not.

Let's go over for a moment just who was on the Security Council in 2002, and their reported roles in Mowbray's piece (my own paraphrases interspersed):

Permanent members

Britain -- Secondhand reports suggest meeting with Kerry.

China -- Nothing on record.

France -- Directly confirms meeting with Kerry. Jean-David Levitte, then France's chief U.N. representative and now his country's ambassador to the United States, said through a spokeswoman that Mr. Kerry did not have a single group meeting as the senator has described, but rather several one-on-one or small-group encounters. He added that Mr. Kerry did not meet with every member of the Security Council, only "some" of them. When pressed for those "some," Levitte could only name himself and the former UK Ambassador to the UN.

Russia -- Nothing on record.

United States -- An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations remarked: "We were as surprised as anyone when Kerry started talking about a meeting with the Security Council."

Elected members


Bulgaria -- Stefan Tafrov, Bulgaria's ambassador at the time, said he remembers the period well because it "was a very contentious time." Denies meeting with Kerry.

Cameroon -- Directly confirms meeting with Kerry.

Colombia -- Ambassador Andres Franco, the permanent deputy representative from Colombia during its Security Council membership from 2001 to 2002, said, "I never heard of anything."

Guinea -- Nothing on record.

Ireland -- Nothing on record.

Mauritius -- Nothing on record.

Mexico -- Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's then-ambassador to the United Nations, said: "There was no meeting with John Kerry before Resolution 1441, or at least not in my memory."

Norway -- Nothing on record.

Singapore -- Directly confirms meeting with Kerry.

Syria -- Nothing on record.


So what do we have, here? Three (or four, if you accept the secondhand reports of a UK-Kerry encounter) meetings of Security Council constituency personnel with Kerry. Four (including a mystery off-the-record nation) or five (including the United States) outright denials of any contact with Kerry. Those who say they did speak with Kerry demolish his tale of a single group sit-down -- which lie the Kerry campaign even now adheres to. Note two things, here:

First, Kerry's purported meeting with the entire Security Council managed to leave out a full third of the Council.

Second, go ahead and re-read the quoted lies above. Notice a surprise guest at the table in Kerry's imaginary international conference? Germans. Kerry is manufacturing a Security Council meeting involving nations that weren't on the Security Council in 2002.

This much is on the record.

Here's what's off the record. I write this with two caveats -- I'm not laying down everything that's off the record, and Mowbray and the Washington Times have done their own work independent of Red State on this count, so I reveal nothing whatsoever passed on to either in confidence. See the list of countries there? Seven nations have "Nothing on record" appended to them. But that doesn't mean their personnel had nothing to say on the subject. Let's put it this way: if you ever want to disabuse yourself of the myth that John Kerry will command unique respect in the wider world, go ahead and call some UN missions to fact-check his rhetorical invocations of their names and nations. Red Staters encountered a gamut of reactions, from outright stupefaction to the fellow who said, "Do you really want me to research this when we both know it's a lie?"

The one reaction we didn't encounter? "John Kerry? Sure, we met with him."

Bottom line, folks: John Kerry has spent the past two years repeating over and over and over and over and over and over and over again the lie that he had a single sit-down meeting with the United Nations Security Council prior to the Iraq war resolution vote. The reality is that he met with a mere handful of Security Council constituency personnel -- members of four, perhaps five, and certainly fewer than half of the delegations -- in scattered, ad hoc encounters over a vague period of time.

This isn't mere exaggeration. It's an outright lie -- by this standard, I've convened meetings of the Security Council -- and as I said, it matters. For this is no mere game of rhetorical gotcha. Rhetorical gotcha is digging up a film clip of John Edwards at a function with the Vice President; it is calling the President on a regrettable lapse of memory, and pretending this constitutes a serious critique of either. We can expect honest Democrats who reveled in these examples to feel sorrow and shame at the exposure of John Kerry. We can also expect this demographic to be vanishingly small.

This isn't gotcha: it directly undermines a key element of the Kerry mythos. After a public lifetime of anti-Americanism and fecklessness, Kerry knows that he needs drive home the five points listed above in order to convince the American people of his fitness to represent and lead our nation abroad. How to square this with that? How to explain the big lie? How to dismiss the appropriation of -- and believe us, the insult to -- these nations with whom Kerry will purportedly work and ally? How to pretend that this is the act of a man laying claim as a central campaign theme the pretense to superior diplomacy, and yes, honesty? How to explain that nettlesome Iraq war resolution vote now? What does John Kerry say? Does he forthrightly acknowledge his error? Or, like the loudmouthed teenager caught bragging about romantic conquests never made, does he simply pretend it never happened?

One thing is certain: we don't have to.

http://www.redstate.org/story/2004/10/24/204215/41