As to what Kerry would have done, you can count on two aspwects of his nature:

1. He would have bent over BACKWARDS before sending men in to battle to make sure there was no viable path, instead of jumping at ANY excuse or even inventing casii belli as W did over and over. For one rerason, he was there on the ground and knows what it means to stand into danger.

2. He would have understood the data before himn well enough to realize it was rotten, because he is capable of thinking about information and seeing when it doesn't add up.

W's only alarm goes off when the data threatens to make him look bad. He doesn't dig consistency or logical sequence, or misestimations of importance or other dodges, except as tools in PR. Using these things as a way to reason through second hand information from a distant scene is beyond him.

A