Republicans spent the week of 13 August 2004 attacking John Kerry as an unreliable flip-flopper on Iraq, but a close review of his speeches before and after the March 2003 invasion shows a largely coherent record, with two genuine inconsistencies.
When the Senate voted 77-23 in October 2002 to authorize force, Kerry backed the measure on one condition: disarming Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, and only after exhausting multilateral inspections. He explicitly ruled out a unilateral US war unless the threat was imminent.
His criticism of the Bush administration was consistent throughout: he faulted the White House for rushing diplomacy, neglecting coalition-building, and having no credible postwar reconstruction plan.
The contradictions surfaced when Kerry said he would have cast the same vote even knowing Baghdad had no WMDs, which clashed with his 2002 rationale. His claim that the vote was meant to pressure Saddam rather than authorize combat also sat uneasily against his 1991 Gulf War opposition, which he called at the time "a vote about war."
The sustained Republican attacks had measurable effect: polls showed Bush with a clear lead on perceived steadfastness. Kerry, who also faced criticism for voting against $87 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan aid, acknowledged that his positions were often nuanced.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in August 2004, in its own words.