If you're looking for something more confusing than John Kerry's multiple positions on gay marriage, try to piece together his many different stances on terrorism and the war in Iraq. Let's try a quick summary. First, Kerry insisted that the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein and that going to war in Iraq would be the right thing to do. But then, a half year after the fact, he voted against the $87 billion supplemental bill to fund the troops-right after he insisted that hanging the troops out to dry in the middle of a war would be wrong. Dizzying? Read it again.

This reversal deserves a second look. In a New York Times op-ed in September of 2002, Kerry wrote: "If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement …" In that same op-ed, in a sentence that would add tension to Kerry's later claim that we never should have gone to war without the consent of the international community, he wrote that we ought to enforce the U.N. resolutions against Iraq, "even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act." In a debate in May of 2003, Kerry declared that he "would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." At that point, no one could have considered John Kerry to be an anti-war candidate.

Then came Howard Dean's meteoric rise in the polls and the start of major difficulties in Iraq, and Kerry began to lose the support of the powerful anti-war contingent of the Democratic Party. Now, he began to redefine his vote for the war. "And the fact is, in the resolution that we passed, we did not empower the president to do regime change," Kerry said in September of 2003. To put it more precisely, Kerry argued that "I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations."

But these were vague, unconvincing qualifiers. No one with a shred of political perception could fail to scoff at Kerry's after-the-fact distinction between voting to authorize the war and voting to authorize the president to decide whether to authorize the war. This was especially true when Kerry later said that his vote was not intended to authorize the president to effect regime change in Iraq. Kerry needed some major gesture, something that would convince the anti-war Left that he was one of them at heart. And so, after declaring: "I don't think anyone in the Congress is going to not give our troops ammunition, not give our troops the ability to be able to defend themselves," Kerry voted against the emergency $87 billion appropriation for the troops in Iraq. Somehow, his gambits worked, and he's now the Democratic presidential nominee.

Now, with no weapons of mass destruction discovered in Iraq, the Shiite, Kurd and Sunni populations struggling to form some semblance of a democracy, and constant terrorist attacks, Iraq needs a firm hand and steady leadership, not a series of flip flops and waffles. Our miscalculations in Iraq have been grievous-running out of bullets and then importing more from Israel, spending more than we could ever have imagined and grounding our main rationale for the war in something that turned out to be false. But in the face of those mistakes, our response shouldn't be to waffle or to cut and run, but to stay the course and win the war, even if we lose some of the battles along the way.