Unpublished Letter to the Editor

Editor,

John Kerry has been repeatedly tagged as a flip-flopper by President Bush and his supporters by taking his statements out of context. A great example of this is his supposed flip-flop on maintaining the troop strength in South Korea.

On August 1st on 'This Week', Sen. Kerry said, "If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just (in Iraq), but elsewhere in the world. In the Korean peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps."

On Wednesday, Kerry said that he was concerned about Bush's "hastily announced" plan because it would be "withdrawing unilaterally 12,000 troops from the Korean Peninsula at the very time that we are negotiating with North Korea, a country that really has nuclear weapons"

Is there a flip-flop here? No. Kerry said that he would perhaps pull troops out of South Korea if he could use diplomacy to defuse the situation there. He is worried that Bush is pulling out troops out and weakening our hand against the threat of North Korea without first defusing the situation. Sounds pretty consistent to me.

Sincerely,

Scott M Taylor