Friday, March 19, 2004

The Washington Post writes a TV commercial for Kerry, if his campaign has the good sense to produce it:

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further - on funding for this."

... In testimony to Congress on March 27, 2003, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." ...

... "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, ... in February 2003, predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

The capture of Iraq did proceed rapidly, allowing Bush to proclaim on May 1 that "major combat operations" were over and to declare "victory" in the "Battle of Iraq." ...


Just do a series of soundbites and floating headlines like this. Remind viewers that the Bushies knew the State Department had warned of the potential for chaos, and thus much greater human and dollar costs than they were predicting.

Tie it up with Kerry saying that, whatever differences we might have haf on the war, we all deserve a president who'll level with us -- and that's the kind of president he'll be.

I think you can build a winning coalition by combining anti-war Americans and Americans are in the middle on Iraq. I think a lot of the people in the latter group agree with those in the former group that they were fed a line of bull about the war.

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