Kerry voices deep regret for voting for Iraq war

WASHINGTON -- Four years to the day after voting to authorize war in Iraq, Senator John F. Kerry yesterday asserted that the vote is his greatest regret of his political career, and said all lawmakers who voted for the war should admit that it was a mistake.

``There's nothing -- nothing -- in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close," Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote in a dispatch on the liberal blog HuffingtonPost.com. ``We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution."

Twenty-nine Senate Democrats joined all but one of the Senate's Republicans in approving the war resolution Oct. 11, 2002. Other prominent Democrats -- including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of Kerry's possible 2008 presidential rivals -- have not repudiated their votes.

Throughout his 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry said he would not have changed his vote to authorize force to topple Saddam Hussein. His struggles to articulate his position on the war epitomized his difficulty in communicating his campaign message.

Yesterday's pronouncement marks Kerry's latest attempt to establish himself as a firmly antiwar senator as he prepares for another possible run for the White House. Last October, Kerry said for the first time that he had been wrong to vote to give President Bush the authority to remove Hussein by force.

This summer, Kerry pushed a resolution that would have required the president to withdraw nearly all combat troops from Iraq by July 2007. That position drew Kerry a rebuke yesterday from Bush, who held it up as an example of a ``cut and run" policy championed by Democrats.

``I would cite my opponent in the 2004 campaign when he said there needs to be a date certain from which to withdraw from Iraq," Bush said in a White House news conference.

``I characterize that as `cut and run,' because I believe it is `cut and run,' " Bush said. ``They may not use `cut and run,' but they say `date certain' is when to get out, before the job is done. That is `cut and run.' "

Kerry reacted angrily to the description of his plan. He has advocated setting a deadline for the withdrawal of most troops to force Iraqis to settle political differences and take responsibility for the security of their nation. ``He wraps my strategy in slogans, because he's afraid to take responsibility" for a failed war policy, Kerry said in a statement.

In his blog entry, Kerry urged readers to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, which has the names of more than 58,000 US troops killed in battle. ``Half the names on that wall were lost after America's leaders knew and later acknowledged our strategy wasn't working," Kerry wrote. ``It was immoral then and it is immoral now to be quiet or equivocal in the face of that kind of delusion. Just think about what that Wall might look like for this war."