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.'