Kerry: We're The Bad Guys

At the Condoleeza Rice confirmation hearings today, John Kerry explained why insurgents are fighting us in Iraq -- because of George H. W. Bush:

Mr. Kerry said the United States seemed not to have learned from the 1991 war, and the cost of breaking promises. Mr. Hussein's forces disbanded in 1991, he said, because the United States had promised it would pay them if they did.

"But we didn't pay them," Mr. Kerry went on. "We went back on that promise. And they got angry and organized." (full story in NYTimes, here)

Hmmm. As I recall, we left Iraq in '91 with one Saddam Hussein still in power, so how exactly were we supposed to pay his army? We did not follow up as we should have with the country's repressed ethnic groups, and we should have, but where did this promise to the Iraqi army come from? Did his magic CIA hat tell him about it? Do I have it wrong?

In any case, to blame what's going on in Iraq on anything other than a struggle to stop Democracy by entrenched Baathist and Islamofascist powers is America-bashing.