Kerry made a mistake in voting to give Bush the authority to declare war, i.e., he made the mistake of TRUSTING the guy to make the right decision. No argument from me on that issue.

About Iraq, the problems are:
1) the war was started on a pretext - Iraq had no WMD (they been found yet?) and therefore was not a direct threat to US, plus it had no connection with Al Qaida (the so-called Prague meeting was disproven).

2) the architects of war disregarded all previous analyses done by the State Dept on how to rebuild the nation after the war, preferring to rely on ideologues with no Middle Eastern expertise whatsoever. One example is Michael Fleischer (brother of Ari, Bush's 1st press secretary) being hired to privatize Iraq' economy. He also told the Chicago Tribune - apparently without irony - that the Americans are going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business, because "The only paradigm they know is cronyism".

3) The hand-picked governing alliance was composed of formerly exiled Iraqis. Which isn't necessarily all bad, unless they've been away so long that they've lost touch with what Iraq was all about (Chalabi left Iraq when he was in his teens). Former golden boy Chalabi is wanted in Jordan for embezzlement.

Or, put another way: how'd you like it if the strongest country in the world came in and finally, finally, got rid of a horrible dictator; but could not even restore basic services to the pre-dictator days; insisted on using their workers (at a much higher cost) instead of using perfectly capable, and available, home-grown ones; picked up and imprisoned a lot of people on any excuse and tortured most of them; and had no firm plan to transfer power and end their occupation? I think you'd get a little mad too.

About being secure, well, 9/11 happened when this administration was already in power. What was the title of the Presidential Daily Briefing again? Oh yeah, "Bin Laden to Strike in the US". But brush clearing in Crawford took priority, I'm sure. Yep, he never made any mistakes.