John Kerry Will Hold Oversight Hearings on Obama’s Afghanistan Surge
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I caught up with Sen. John Kerry this week and asked him about, among other things, the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, disclosed that he's decided to hold oversight hearings on the Obama administrations handling of the war. You can read about it at GlobalPost.
Kerry is one of the few top government officials who can impact U.S. policy to have fought in Vietnam. He soured on the war, and came home and enlisted in the antiwar movement, which made him a hero to American liberals.
Liberals today are wary of Obama's decision to boost the number of troops in Afghanistan, and even though he is a Democratic president, several dozen members of the House have refused to vote for appropriations to fund his escalation.
That puts Kerry in a key spot. If he continues to endorse the Obama administration's handling of the war, he will lend his credibility to its efforts. On the other hand, if he emerges from the hearings as a critic of the war, he will complicate life at the White House considerably.
It was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during the chairmanship of Democratic Sen. William Fulbright, that gave the antiwar movement its first national platform, and official credibility, during the Vietnam War, when it held oversight hearings in 1966.
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Reader Comments
kerry
where is the air force? Is droons are they can do? The air force has become an irresponsible millitary brance or are they worried that obamma will try them for killing a civilian?
Kerry"s POW/MIA committee did all that could be done
and he never bad mouthed POW families. Senator Kerry accepted assignment to this committee and the role as its chair inspite of his entire staff advising him that it was a lose/lose opportunity. It was for those families that he did it.
That committee consisted of all the Veterans of the war, except Al Gore. One of Kerry's first actions was to give Bob Smith, the Republican ranking member half the committee staff - an unusual action for any chair. Senator Kerry was able Vietnamese to allow Americans to go anywhere by helicopter - unannounced. He, himself, made 14 trips there to assure that the process was working. He also was able to get them to redouble the effort to repatriate remains long buried in South East Asia. The current percent of Americans not accounted for in Vietnam is far smaller than in WWII and the Korean War, partly because of this effort.
The committee looked into every sighting. They determined that the Newsweek cover photo, which started the call for a committee, supposedly of captured US GIs was a photo that was not of Americans and not taken in Vietnam. The amazing thing is that Kerry was able to keep a committee that included John McCain, Bob Kerrey, and Bob Smith working in a clam, methodical fashion that led to a report they all agreed to - something McCain had thought impossible.
The strongest proponent on that committee for the idea that Americans were left behind was Bob Smith - he not only signed the final report that said there was no large scale prison - he endorsed Kerry in 2004, saying that he disagreed with him on every issue, but because he was a good person.
Kerry?
Come on. This is the same clown who bad mouthed Vietnam POW families and failed to live up to his promise to do everything he could to bring home the POWs.
And if the font in this posting area could be any smaller--used to make the posts--it would be invisible!
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