WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (AFP) - Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday jumped into the fracas over presidential candidate John Kerry's position on Iraq, chiding the Democrat for a "tangled web of all his shifts and changes."
Cheney weighed in on Kerry's statement Monday that he still would have voted in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq, even if he knew what he knows today about Saddam Hussein's weapons capacity.
President George W. Bush gloated Tuesday that Kerry had belatedly endorsed the invasion, prompting a furious response from several Democrats that their candidate's position had been distorted by the White House.
Cheney said in a statement that Kerry first voted for the war, then opposed it. "Now John Kerry says he was for the war. But now some of his own aides are saying that his vote to authorize force wasn't really a vote to go to war."
"John Kerry is caught in a tangled web of all his shifts and changes. We need a commander-in-chief who is steady and steadfast."
Kerry insists that while he voted to authorize force in Iraq, he never meant to give Bush a blank check to go in without international support or a post-war plan for Iraq's reconstruction.
"I've been consistent all along," the Masschusetts senator told reporters late Tuesday while campaigning in Las Vegas. "I thought we, the United States, needed to stand up to Saddam Hussein and I voted to stand up to Saddam Hussein.
"But I thought we had to do it right, I thought we had to build an international coalition, I thought we had to exhaust remedies available to us," he said. "I'll never send our troops to war without a plan to win the peace."
Cheney took issue with Kerry's explanation that his "yes" vote on Iraq in 2002 was not meant as a vote to go to war.
He said Kerry took just the opposite line in 1991 when he was one of the few who voted against a resolution backing action to roll back Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.
At the time, Kerry was also lobbying for stepped-up diplomacy and greater efforts to build an anti-Saddam coalition. He called the Senate vote part of a "rush to war" by Bush's father, George H.W. Bush.