"What I regret," he said, "is the United States of America, the strongest military power on the face of this planet, has not had diplomacy that matches it. In fact it has had some of the weakest diplomacy that we have ever seen in the history of the conduct of this nation. As I wrote in The New York Times in September, and I maintain it today, and I say this based on my experience in Vietnam and consistent with what I learned there about fighting a war without legitimacy and without the consent of the people: You want consent and you want legitimacy. And that means you must exhaust remedies and build the notion that it is indeed not just a spoken-word last resort, but it is in fact a last resort. The United States of America should never go to war because it wants to go to war, we should go to war because we have to go to war, and that is not clear to people in this country today."
If Kerry is now a San Francisco Democrat, this sounds like the French position.
Kerry's logic: 1) "legitimacy" depended not on the vote he made in Congress, but on the vote France and its allies refused to make in the United Nations, 2) diplomacy failed not because of the intransigence of France and its allies but because the argument that persuaded Kerry himself to vote for war was rightfully deemed unsatisfactory by these foreign powers, and 3) the war was not a "last resort" even though Saddam Hussein refused to disarm peacefully when 250,000 U.S. troops stood at his border.
These arguments might keep Chirac in the Elysee Palace, but they won't return a Democrat to the White House.