Secretary of State John Kerry added to his public embarrassments as he was accused of lying today when he claimed that he and Secretary of State Chuck Hagel had 'opposed the president's decision to go into Iraq'. The Washington Post's Fact Checker column awarded Kerry four out of four 'Pinocchios,' its sliding scale of untruthfulness.

That ignoble result puts Kerry's comment on a credibility par with President Obama's recent claim that he articulated 'the world's red line' - not his own - when he first warned Syria's dictator of the consequences of using chemical weapons.

During an interview on MSNBC on September 5, Kerry said that air strikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria would not become yet another U.S. military quagmire, citing his alleged opposition to the Iraq War. 'I think a lot of Americans, a lot of your listeners, a lot of people in the country,' Kerry said, 'are sitting there and saying, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be Iraq, this is going to be Afghanistan, here we go again."'

'I know this, I've heard it,' he continued. 'And the answer is no, profoundly no. You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator - Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense - and when I was a senator, we opposed the president's decision to go into Iraq but we know full well how that [flawed] evidence [about weapons of mass destruction] was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given.'

But on October 11, 2002, according to Senate records, both Kerry and Hagel cast 'yea' votes on the 'Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.'
Image

That measure, which passed by a 77-23 vote, put Kerry on the pro-war side in a moment that would haunt him in the 2004 presidential campaign.

In its stinging critique, the Post recalled a statement Kerry gave The Boston Globe on March 20, 2003, further pressing the case for war.

'It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone,' Kerry said then, 'Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism ... [T]he only exit strategy is victory. This is our common mission and the world's cause.'

During an October 9, 2002 Senate floor debate, Kerry went beyond merely supporting an Iraq invasion with a silent vote.

'If the president arbitrarily walks away from this course of action ... without good cause or reason,' he argued in a passionate floor speech, 'the legitimacy of any subsequent action by the United States against Iraq will be challenged by the American people and the international community, and I would vigorously oppose the president doing so.'

'When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein, because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region, I will vote because I believe it is the best way to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and the administration, Kerry said at the time.

He later would add a 'yea' vote to an early draft of a $87 billion supplement to the Defense Department's budget in October 2003, which funded Bush's Iraq invasion and ongoing military activity in Afghanistan.

Republicans ran an ad during the 2004 presidential campaign showing Kerry windsurfing off the coast of Massachusetts, and featuring his most memorable quote from a March 16, 2004 event at Marshall University in West Virginia.

As he tried to explain an apparent flip-flop that had him voting for the early version before opposing the final bill, Kerry said, 'I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.'

He later called that statement a 'very inarticulate way of saying something.'

At the time, his early 'yea' vote was a protest against a provision that would have rescinded some tax cuts in order to pay for the war.