Thursday, July 19, 2007

Stuck in the Senate

[posted by Callimachus]


Sen. John Kerry said during a C-Span appearance that fears of a bloodbath after the US withdrawal from Vietnam never materialized. He says he’s met survivors of the “reeducation camps” who are thriving in modern Vietnam. An award-winning investigation by the Orange County Register concludes that at least 165,000 people perished in the camps.

Hat tip Don Surber, who has the reaction that suggested the title here.

But Kerry isn't stupid. He knows his history. So do many of those on the left who talk this way. They know, too, that history can be rewritten if you paint lies over facts often enough.

More and more, like I said before, I miss bloggers like Vietpundit to set my fellow Americans straight. Here, he translates the work of North Vietnamese writer Pham Thi Hoai:

The Vietnam war did not result in the collapse of the United States. Rather, it led to the disappearance of the southern Republic of Vietnam, a nation that once dominated half of the country and which was no less legitimate than its brother in the north.

After liberation, however, southern society was subjected to intense repression: prison, concentration camp, the seizure of property, discrimination against bi-racial children, the purge of intellectuals, the destruction and prohibition of southern culture, the complete erasure of numerous careers and many lives. These are not the actions of righteous winners. Nor are they evidence of the superiority of the new regime in relation to its recently vanquished enemy.

Thirty years after the war, the country has never once acknowledged the painful exodus of almost 1 million southern Vietnamese, the “boat people.” It is as if they are no longer Vietnamese and have been excommunicated from the unified nation. It is as if the country belongs to only a single group of Vietnamese but not to another. It is as if they believed that national feeling can grow naturally from out of a deep hole of division and hatred, like a rice plant growing out from a trench.

Or his friend, Minh Duc, who responded to this with:

I have forgotten too and was reminded of it by him. But unlike him, I am not ashame[d] - not at all. Who would want to remember such a thing. Who would want to remember the savegery, the barbarism, the humiliation, the dishonor, the shame, the fear, and the helplessness that befallen upon us. Who would want to remember that once we were so far from Heaven that Hell is not a metaphor but a living reality.

It is coming again. A second great shame for my country in my lifetime; a second great abandonment of allies and friends in the face of an enemy; a second great defeat by an enemy who never won, and held, a battlefield in the length of the war. A purely political defeat.

Who lost Iraq? We did. Me, you, all of us. The big nation-state has yet to learn how to win this new kind of war of elephants against fleas. Call it what you will: Fourth Generation warfare is one label:

"Fourth generation warfare uses all available networks-political, economic, social, and military-to convince the enemy's political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency."

You lose when you let them convince you the price you're paying is too high. You lose when you let them turn you against one another, instead of against them. You lose when they massacre a village (did they kill the babies first, or last?), and your reaction is to get angry at America.

Shouldn't the same people who argue we should react to terrorism by refusing to be terrorized, react to a 4GW fight by refusing to become demoralized?

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Monday, May 08, 2006

Kerry Quotes Jefferson

Not. JFK has been sent to the dunce's stool -- again -- this time for quoting Thomas Jefferson in praise of dissent -- with a quote nobody has ever found in Jefferson's actual writings.

Eh, I'm willing to give him a pass for this. A great many quotes attributed to the Founders or to Lincoln were never said by them. They're often pithy quotes that obscure people wrote, which over time, by deliberate effort of deception or not, have gravitated into the sphere of the brighter lights in our history.

There are a raft of bogus quotes by the Founders in praise of Christianity as a governing principle, for instance. ("We have staked the future of the American civilization not on the power of government, but on the capacity of Americans to abide by the Ten Commandments of God" -- Madison never said it.) They have been collected and promoted by the Christianists among us, notably David Barton of WallBuilders Inc., and now have been enshrined in the Congressional Record.

Progressive and atheists are not immune to the practice.

The quote Kerry used was consistent with what Jefferson might have thought, and written, circa 1798. The words weren't so wildly out of character for him that they should have been immediately flagged. I bet half the bloggers pouncing on Kerry this weekend couldn't have identified the "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" quote as a dud last weekend.

Absent any evidence that he knew beforehand it was a bogus quote, or that he sought any special benefit from using it in willful error, I see no reason to bother Kerry. You don't get much from a Jefferson quote, anyhow. It was the genius of the man's life that, sooner or later, he compromised every political principle he had. I see no reason to rub Kerry's face in an honest mistake. It does no harm to be charitable about his intentions.

But, but, but ... But what? Because he wouldn't do the same for you? Do you only take the high road as a matter of compromise, or is it your default position. Why pass up a chance to bash the opposition? Do you not reside in the full expectation that your opponent will make real and dishonest errors in time. Isn't it our duty to inform the voters how bad the opposition is? Nobody outside of school cares about this one. And you'll do far better with the voters if they see you as charitable when you can be, the moreso if the other guy is not.

Otherwise, you'll just end up like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. No matter how much they certainly know about their respective topics, it's hard to take their anti-Bush screeds seriously, because you know they'd be writing with exactly the same tone no matter what he had done for the past 5 years or so. Ultimately it has nothing to do with any reality except their visceral contempt for certain things he embodies, to them.

In a harbor near here a cargo ship sat for months with a broken siren that howled day and night. Sometimes there would be a fire somewhere in town, so during those times the siren was technically right. But it didn't do any good and nobody paid it any mind.

Though according to this pro-Kerry site, the former candidate may, in fact, have been quoting professional America-basher Howard Zinn instead. If Kerry thinks Zinn is Jefferson, then we have a problem.

It's more complicated than that, of course.

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Monday, May 01, 2006

Speculate

So how would the country, and the world, be different today if John Kerry had tipped Ohio the other way in 2004 and won the election? What would be the state of things in Iraq? In New Orleans? In Iran? In Venezuela? What would be the price of gasoline? Would the immigrant population be out in the streets today?

While we're finding shapes in the clouds, what kind of catbird seat would Saddam Hussein be in today if he had been left in power, with Iran playing its game and the price of oil what it is and another three years to chip away at the sanctions regime?

UPDATE: Interesting to note that Victor Davis Hanson is speculating down the same path-not-taken:

No one pauses to suggest what the region would now look like with Saddam reaping windfall oil profits, 15 years of no-fly zones, ongoing corruption in Oil-for-Food, the bad effects of the U.N. embargo, Libya's weapons program, and an unfettered Dr. Khan. If a newly provocative Russia is willing to sell missiles to Iran's crazy Ahmadinej(ih)ad, imagine what its current attitude would be to its old client Saddam.

Or perhaps, as in the 1980s when over a million perished, our realists, who seem fond of such good old days of order and stability, could once again encourage an unleashed Saddam, with Uday and Qusay at his side, to be played against Iran for a (nuclear) round two. How sad that those who once fallaciously argued that the fascist Saddam was the proper counterweight to the fascist Iran now ignore that the genuine corrective is a democratic and humane Iraq.

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Monday, October 18, 2004

A Case for Kerry

MDL, an insightful blog-friend, called my attention to Kevin Drum's foreign policy-based justification of a vote for John Kerry. The pitch was made to a professedly "undecided" Dan Drezner whose politics seem sufficiently like mine. Let's see if it worked.

"So: we should look primarily at John Kerry after 9/11, not before."

OK, fair enough. I don't have a problem with that, in fact I've said that all along about both candidates. Though John Kerry seemed to spend most of the summer turning the spotlight on his past.

"We should look at the people likely to be the top foreign policy advisors in a Kerry administration."

Which is a bit of a guessing game. And there's no way, even if you discover who is going to sit in the cabinet, to know how the power structure would play out. After all, if you were told that Colin Powell was going to hold the key foreign policy position in the Bush administration, you wouldn't expect what we've been getting.

"And we should look at his concretely expressed views about how best to fight and win the war on terror."

Hell, yes, but I can't find them! I can't look at them till I look for them. Drum's post is primarily an extensive citation from a "New Republic" article, which attempts to construct a Kerry foreign policy -- and which contains only two short quotes from Kerry himself, from a speech he made in February.

Most of the quotes are from Beers and Biden, who may or may not end up being on Kerry's foreign policy team. With the inarticulate Bush, I can understand basing a policy overview on Rice and Rumsfeld. But Kerry? This is the best we can do?

And look at the quotes: "We must support human rights groups, independent media, and labor unions dedicated to building a democratic culture from the grassroots up." Bravo! So where is his support for those things as they are now strugging into life in Iraq? Instead, he dismisses the nascent democracy there as "puppets," and offers verbal aid and comfort to the enemies who want to kill them before they take root. Not very promising.

"We need an international effort to compete with radical madrassas." Yes, we do, and I don't think anyone in the Bush White House would disagree with that. But where's the plan, John? That's like telling me "Kerry has a cure for cancer" because Kerry says "cancer should be cured."

Biden's tough talk on the Saudis is something I can get behind. But I was disturbed by a piece he wrote for the "Wall Street Journal" about a month ago in which he outlined a Kerry foreign policy program that did not make a single mention of Iraq, except as an example of a war that never ought to have happened. The next administration, whether red or blue, is going to have Iraq on its front burner, like it or not. The Bushies know this. I'm not sure the Kerrys want to accept that.

Beers: "What Al Qaeda did during its Afghan period was to create a jihadist movement on a global basis." I'd say they inspired it, as much as created it. Kerry's repeated (and more recent than February) comments about Bin Laden and Tora Bora and "outsourcing" tell me 1. he's too fixated on al Qaida, not the broader picture, in spite of what Beers says, 2. He has insufficient appreciation for the military realities of fighting on someone else's turf.

"Kerry has endorsed the 9/11 Commission's plans for intelligence reform ..."

He endorsed them within hours of the report being released. Did he even know what it was before he endorsed it? Did he think through all the consequences? That's the kind of thing that's easy to say on the campaign trail.

"... and has proposed enlarging the regular Army by 40,000 soldiers and doubling the Army's Special Forces capacity."

All the while playing scare-the-public with the specter of the big bad DRAFT. And telling Americans that the spectacular military effort in Iraq was a failure and a waste of life. Can't have that one both ways.

"Presently, Army Special Forces units — which include agile and innovative forces best trained and equipped to operate deep behind enemy lines and in nontraditional combat situations — total about 26,000 active and reserve personnel, or only 2 percent of the entire Army."

In fact, the military already is expanding Special Forces, and it can and should be done. But Special Forces are "special" in part because they are elite. Sixty percent of the active duty military who aspire to be Special Forces don't make it.

"It combines a serious, realistic view of global terror with a willingness to adapt to events that's sadly lacking in George Bush's worldview."

I see plenty of adapting on the part of Bush & Co. Gods know they've made enough mistakes. But after all that, they've come to an approach to Iraq that seems to make sense for where we are now. I don't know that Kerry could sensibly change very much about it. What I see on the Kerry side is a lack of even a proposal to do things differently in Iraq, but only a promise to do so. And a deep-seated wish that that whole war never had happened.

But I appreciate Kevin Drum's bid to persuade an undecided voter with sane rhetoric. For the other kind, all I had to do was turn to his "comments" file off this post. It's like a great big quote roll from my co-workers:

I take exception to the notion that how Bush saw the world before 9/11 should not affect our view of him now. THE WHOLE REASON 9/11 HAPPENED was dear W's "worldview" or whatever you choose to call it.

Of course the wingnuts will never agree, but had Gore or Kerry been president starting 2001, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that 9/11 would never have happened.

Those who are 'uncomfortable' with Kerry are so because they have bought the GOP propaganda about the Democratic candidate.

The premise that 9/11 "changed the world" may be the problem in assessing candidates -or understanding the world. The world did not change; the United States simply felt, however briefly, what many parts of the world endure much of the time. This apocalyptic view, combined with a belief that there are military solutions to socio-economic problems, seems to be shared by both parties. Only a few, such as Dennis Kucinich, have articulated a more mature approach.

NOTHING COULD BE WORSE THAN BUSH. What's to think about?

How can ANYONE vote for Bush. Either they have to be senile, or greedy. Are 50% of Americans really that stupid?

Yeah, rationally seen, 9-11 was equivalent to about 3 weeks worth of traffic deaths in the US.

Let's keep sight of the fact that there are other threats in the world besides terrorism. Full scale nuclear war, climate change, economic collapse (I might survive but plenty of people would not!), epidemic disease, whatnot.

Want lies? Want wars forever? Want to lose civil rights? Want limited, expensive healthcare? Want pollution?

Osama has already won. He has turned us into a nation more and more in his image. Before 9-11, we fought only defensive wars. War as an instrument of national policy was something out of the past, something the Romans and the huns and the moguls did. (Grenada and Panama aren't big enough to qualify.) Then along came macho monkey George Bush. Brandishing his old time religion of good vs. evil, an eye for an eye, the one true faith against the infidels, and hoping to reprise the Republicans' forty years of success in running against national bogeymen, Bush has dragged us back to the middle ages. The Muslims, Christians and Jews are at each other's throats again and they all seem quite happy about it because it suits each group's purposes.

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Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Kerry and the Cole

Smash has an excellent post linking Kerry's "nuisance" quote to the anniversary of the "Cole" bombing.

MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR JOHN KERRY is running for President of the United States. This past Sunday, in an extensive interview for the New York Times, he revealed his thoughts about fighting terrorism.

“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.”

In Kerry’s world, was the attack on the Cole just a “nuisance?” Does he want to “get back” to the 1990s, when terrorists only killed dozens of people at a shot, rather than hundreds our thousands?

Essentially, Kerry’s goal in the War on Terror appears to be to reduce the terrorists’ effectiveness to a level where he can “safely” focus his attention on other priorities. I’m sorry, but that’s just not good enough for me. My problem with Kerry isn’t that he sees Iraq as a diversion from the War on Terror, but rather that he sees the War on Terror as a diversion from his domestic agenda.

Kerry just doesn’t get it – we can’t wish this conflict away. Our terrorist enemies will not be deterred by tougher law enforcement, a “broader coalition,” or the careful application of “soft power.” They must be crushed militarily, and defeated ideologically. Ultimate victory will require a determined focus, greater sacrifices, and the steadfast will to carry on through difficult setbacks.

Amen, brother. That's the problem a lot of us are having with this candidate. He doesn't inhabit the same world I do.

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Sunday, October 10, 2004

Help, I'm Trapped in the Media Cocoon!

"'Kerry is love, is understanding, is peace. Bush is bad." OK, I can understand an old Stone Age Amazon jungle tribesman squinting at American politics through 5,000 miles and layers of media distortion and seeing that. But here I sit alongside people plugged right in to the media machine and their view of it is essentially the same thing.

Here's the picture that came from, by the way. The photo caption reads: "Kashalpynya, 35, of the Korubo Indian tribe of the Javari Valley in the Amazons dances in front of a poster in favor of American presidential candidate John Kerry in downtown Brasilia on Friday, Oct. 10, 2004. He said, 'Kerry is love, is understanding, is peace. Bush is bad.' "

But what is Kerry? When Kerry says in an interview in The New York Times Magazine that, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," I am going to trust that he means we're going to do such a good job fighting terrorists that the average American won't have to worry about them as we do now. (But I'm not going to trust that he has a good plan to get there until I hear one.)

However, I strongly suspect that my pro-Kerry co-workers would like to take that statement more literally. They think terrorism is Bush's fault. No Bush=no terrorism threat. Frankly, if I take their conversations literally and the current polls hold steady and Kerry wins, they'll expect to wake up Nov. 3 in a world suddenly without major conflicts of any sort. Some sort of surreal world where even on "Honeymooners" re-runs Ralph and Alice will be a happy, loving couple.

Maybe I understand that. They and I formerly agreed on most things that came up for discussion around here. Even now, I tend to align more with Kerry than Bush on most social and domestic issues; and on Sept. 10, 2001, those were the "most important things." When the planes and the towers came down, my choice was to support the president who, in the words of Dennis Miller, gets up every morning, scratches his balls and thinks, "I'm gonna kill me some @#%$&* terrorists today!"

One alternative to that was to find a candidate to do a right-flank around Bush. Lieberman, perhaps, or McCain. Someone tough-smart on terror AND right in social issues. That person never got into the game. My other realistic alternative was to cling to the old issues, and part of that is making out that a war on terrorism is just an overreaction or a plot by the evil Republicans to take away my rights. And gods know I hear enough of that around me in here.

If we Americans value our society, our polity, our rights and liberties, and our security, we must begin exposing George W. Bush and his War Party for what they are: craven usurpers aiming at nothing less than the undermining of all those things that most of us hold dear.

It’s going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration’s fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line. [Counterpunch.org]

That's a shifty and uncomfortable position, though; Michael Moore couldn't even make it look consistent and tenable for the length of a single movie. Yet my co-workers seem to be too intellectually flabby to walk the tightrope act of saying Islamist terrorism is a real threat to Western civilization, but Bush is taking the wrong approach to it. The nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world has got to be running pretty strong in such people.

I just keep hearing the same two quotes, in various forms, from my co-workers:

"Don't you think we're overreacting to this whole thing?" [circa Sept. 14, 2001]

"Terrorism, schmerrorism, it's all Bush's fault."

Or quotes like this one, from an AP story tonight about the Afghan elections, by a representative of Human Rights Watch:

"Everything that went well on election day was as a result of the Afghan people. Everything that went wrong was due to the international community."

It's just that simple, isn't it? Once you can squeeze inconvenient facts like Mohammed Atta back down into the pit of forgetfulness.

Armed Liberal (posting at Winds of Change) reminds me of the original "media coccoon" post, almost a year ago, from Mickey Kaus:

The point is that reporters and editors at papers like the Times (either one!) are exquisitely sensitive to any sign that Democrats might win, but don't cultivate equivalent sensitivity when it comes to discerning signs Republicans might win. (Who wants to read that?)

Or sensitive to signs that American foreign policies might cause people to get killed, or that Americans might be hypocrites, or that Americans' religiosity, or their pride in their culture and symbols, are irrational and dangerous. But they are blankly and willfully unaware that Islamist death-cult preaching or Palestinian martyr-mongering have any effect on the world.

Volokh, meanwhile, finds the back half of Kerry's NYT quote more disturbing than the front half. He compared terrorism, the way he'd like to see it contained, to prostitution and illegal gambling:

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It's true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren't "threatening the fabric of [American] life," but that's because they never threatened it that much in the first place. One can live in a nation with millions of acts of prostitution or illegal gambling per year or per day. There are good reasons for simply calling off those wars altogether. Surely the strategy for dealing with terrorism must be very different, in nearly every conceivable way, from the strategy for dealing with prostitution or illegal gambling.

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After the Second Debate

I'm still seeing a John Kerry who's more indignant about the measly $300 I got back from the government two years ago than about the Islamist fanatics who slammed passenger jets into skyscrapers and killed 3,000 Americans just because they were Americans.

Mickey Kaus, meanwhile, reports on Bush's "big whiff":

Bush once again failed to pick apart Kerry's annoyingly opportunistic Iraq/Osama/Tora Bora attack. He could have argued a) Yes we made some mistakes but Kerry is letting a few of Zarqawi's bombs panic him--and trying to get them to panic the electorate. What kind of leader does that?; b) Kerry voted against the 1991 Gulf War, which began the inspection regime he says he wanted to continue! If we hadn't prosecuted that war, Saddam almost certainly would have developed a nuclear bomb, no? c) Bush did note that Kerry's plan for Iraq is basically the same as Bush's plan (plus a summit), but didn't flesh out the point in way that would be clear to the average viewer.

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Thursday, October 07, 2004

Told You So

Duelfer Report, 9/11 Commission, Lord Butler Report, it's becoming predictable; each side -- those who consider Saddam's removal justified and those who don't -- find ammunition for their views in the same pages.

The Daily Telegraph editorializes on Saddam's weapons of mass corruption.

Was it all a mistake? On the contrary: the real case for war, consistently argued in these pages, depended neither on WMD nor on the al-Qa'eda connection. Saddam had to be deposed for both strategic and moral reasons, which have broadly been vindicated. Though the war on terror is far from over, the threat from terrorist states has diminished. If free Iraq can stay the course - by holding elections, by putting Saddam on trial, and by defeating the insurgency - it will have a profound impact on the other despots of the Middle East and beyond.

If anything, the report reinforces the case for regime change, by demonstrating the malign influence that Saddam's Iraq exerted over the entire international system. His capacity for genocide had indeed decayed, but by 2003 he was no longer the pariah he had been in 1991.

Having corrupted and undermined the sanctions regime, Saddam was more dangerous than ever before. The stench of his crimes lingers, not only in Iraq but also at the UN. The justification offered for the war by Mr Blair may have been the wrong one, but it was still a just war.

John Kerry, of course, doesn't see it that way:

Yesterday, the CIA released a wide-ranging report on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The report concluded that Iraq had essentially dismantled its weapons of mass destruction and stopped any further military WMD production after the end of the first Gulf War. In other words, the report concluded that the inspections and the sanctions worked.

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The Choice


SENATOR KERRY: I have a better plan for homeland security. I have a better plan to be able to fight the war on terror by strengthening our military, strengthening our intelligence, by going after the financing more authoritatively, by doing what we need to do to rebuild the alliances, by reaching out to the Muslim world, which the president has almost not done, and beginning to isolate the radical Islamic Muslims, not have them isolate the United States of America. ...

Which leads Wretchard to the observation:

Philosophically, the choice between Bush and Kerry is not over the fine-tuning of policy options; it is between limited response with deterrence on the one hand, and limited response with yet more limited response on the other hand. A large number of the Administration's critics accuse it of not providing "enough boots on the ground" in Iraq, of emboldening insurgents by "backing down" in Fallujah yet are perfectly willing to decouple terrorist acts from state sponsors and make any American retaliatory action contingent on passing the Global Test.

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He's No Tony Blair

Jim Geraghty is on Kerry's case, as usual. But this time he's basing it on the blogging work of Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds), whose politics and mine have been flowing the same way the last four years (voted for Gore in '00, "libertarian, pro-gun and pro-gay marriage, ... not exactly a natural Bush supporter"):

Forget missteps like his dissing of our allies in Iraq, Australia, and Poland — which drew a stinging response from the Polish President ("It's sad that a Senator with twenty years of experience does not appreciate Polish sacrifice.") Now even Kerry is admitting that he's not going to be able to deliver on his promises:

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry conceded yesterday that he probably will not be able to convince France and Germany to contribute troops to Iraq if he is elected president.

The Massachusetts senator has made broadening the coalition trying to stabilize Iraq a centerpiece of his campaign, but at a town hall meeting yesterday, he said he knows other countries won't trade their soldiers' lives for those of U.S. troops.

"Does that mean allies are going to trade their young for our young in body bags? I know they are not. I know that," he said.


Body bags. This sounds like the John Kerry of 1971. I can't help but think that, for Kerry, every war is Vietnam. And if he's President, I'm afraid that might turn out to be the case.

Yes, and so am I. And then Geraghty flashes the bullet that Bush dodged this year:

Now - picture the Democrats nominating a candidate who takes the war on terror seriously, who wants to finish the job in Iraq, and who doesn't see every foreign policy issue as a rerun of Vietnam.

A Tony Blair-style Democrat would probably be trouncing Bush right now. Karl Rove & Co. are very lucky to have the opponents they do.

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Monday, October 04, 2004

Let-Down

Bush let us down. Who's "us?" The people who are not traditional Republicans but who agree with him on foreign policy and back him on Iraq and the War on Islamism.

We crossed party lines to support Saddam's overthrow and the quest for freedom in Iraq. We voted against Dubya in 2000 and still have serious problems with much of the GOP's domestic social agenda. We might favor letting gay folks get married or legalizing pot, and differ with Bush on that, but like him we recognize a vicious and hate-filled enemy and we will close ranks to fight it. And we see America's military might as a force that can be a positive good in the world, chasing fascist tyrants from their thrones.

We're half Zell Miller and half Wendell Wilkie. You don't have to be a Bible-thumping Creationist to see and comprehend the notion of "evil."

If all that is so clear to us, and to George W. Bush, why didn't he articulate it against Kerry in Thursday's debate?

Mark Steyn, who's been a Bush-backer all along, frenkly admits that Bush's performance was a big swing-and-a-miss.

In Thursday night's televised debate with John Kerry, he wasn't wrong on the substance, he just didn't have enough of it. ... Bush droned, repeatedly, that Kerry was sending "mixed messages", but his own message could have done with being a little less robotically unmixed. He said: "It's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard -- and it's hard work. It is hard work," again and again, round in circles.

And it is, no doubt. It's tough and it's hard work and it's incredibly hard doing the title number of Singin' in the Rain, but Gene Kelly made it seem blithe and effortless and graceful.

And the President of the United States owes his people a performance -- in wartime especially. Churchill didn't just communicate the weight of the burden that he carried but also that he had the strength to bear it.

But who needs Churchill? It's not just that Tony Blair or John Howard of Australia could have done the job much more convincingly. Almost any of us armchair warriors could have put down John Kerry's feeble generalisations better than Bush did.

Why couldn't Bush at least puncture the hot-air balloons Kerry kept shaping, in his rotund baritone, about "allies" and "summits" and "global tests?" This was supposed to be Bush's knock-out punch. That's why the Republicans, in the debate negotiations, pushed this one to the front of the schedule. Yet he lost it on points.

It's been left to the guys in pajamas to dismantle Kerry's pipe dream policy. Lileks, for instance:

Perhaps the “ally” is that big blue wobbly mass known as the UN, that paragon of moral clarity, that conscience of the globe. You want to really anger a UN official? Tow his car. Short of that you can get away with anything. (Sudan is on the human rights commission, to cite a prominent and amusing detail. It’s like putting Tony Soprano on the New Jersey Waste Management Regulation Board.) I don’t worry that the UN is angry with us. I’d be worried if they weren’t. And I find it interesting that someone who would complain about outsourcing peevishly notes that we hired < psycho screeching strings > HALLIBURTON < /strings > to do the work instead of throwing buckets of billions to French and German contractors who sold them the jets and built the bunkers.

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Tuesday, September 28, 2004

My Three Questions

The presidential debates kick off Thursday night. The topic is foreign policy. Here are a few questions I hope get asked:

1. President Bush contends that the struggle to build a free and democratic Iraq is not just noble in its own right, but "central" to the war on terrorism. But John Kerry and many others call it a "profound diversion" from the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Both sides acknowledge that the fight against Islamist extremism will be won in hearts and minds as well as on battlefields. And there, Bush's record has been nothing to brag about. The media coverage of the bloody insurgency in Iraq reinforces, rightly or not, the image in much of the Muslim world that the U.S. is fighting Muslims, not terrorists. The U.S. has failed to mount an effective PR campaign to express the real purpose of the Americans. The slanders of al Qaida and Al Jazeera go unanswered.

Even people who stood behind Bush during the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq can accept that the next step is building bridges to the Islamic world, and Bush has an awful lot of Abu Ghraib-style baggage for that, while Kerry would give us a fresh start. Can Bush answer the "rebranding America" argument, which has some traction among independent voters?

2. The candidates' views on what to do next in Iraq have much in common. But Kerry often says he will do better in Iraq by getting our major allies to send more troops. Yet French and German government officials have said repeatedly they will not significantly increase military assistance in Iraq even if Kerry is elected.

Gert Weisskirchen, member of parliament and foreign policy expert for Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party, said, “I cannot imagine that there will be any change in our decision not to send troops, whoever becomes president.”

Michel Barnier, the French foreign minister, said last week that France had no plans to send troops “either now or later.” French President Jacques Chirac said last week that, whatever the election results, "French policy with regard to Iraq has not changed and will not change."

How does Kerry explain his proposal in light of that?

3. Beyond Iraq, a crucial issue is the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Iran is, by its own admission, assembling the technology for nuclear weapons. Not long ago it seemed that the upwelling of democracy in that nation would dethrone the mullahs before they got their hands on nukes. That seems unlikely now. Iran may well be a nuclear power by spring. The world's deadliest weapons will be in the hands of religious fanatics with a loathing of the West.

Can Bush effectively lead the world in containing the Iranian nuclear threat, given his administration's woeful reputation in the wake of the Iraq WMD claims of 2002 and his antagonism of the International Atomic Energy Agency?

Kerry has put forth a proposal of his own, to call the bluff of the Iranian government, which claims that its only need is energy. "We should ... organize a group of states that will offer the nuclear fuel they need for peaceful purposes and take back the spent fuel so they can't divert it to build a weapon. If Iran does not accept this, their true motivations will be clear."

Is that really a good idea? Is it the best one he's got?

4. Finally, a question that assuredly won't be answered: Wouldn't a lot of Americans rather see a Jerry Springer-style stare-down between the two men who have been snarking at each other from a distance for months now?

No deal; they won't even be allowed to talk to one another. It will be all pre-game, no Super Bowl.

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Friday, September 24, 2004

Six of One ...

Today in Philadelphia John Kerry told an invited audience that he would wage a "tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror" than Bush has. Kerry even spoke of Islamic radicals bent on forging "an oppressive, fundamentalist super-state" from Central Asia to Western Europe. I'm glad he sees that part of the picture, at least for one day. His supporters of my acquaintance will have to pretend they didn't hear that line, so they can go on insisting that the only reasons for any violence in the world today are Bush, Israel, and Fox News.

Kerry even came close to offering specific ideas in his Philadelphia speech: lock down chemical and nuclear weapons in the old U.S.S.R., stop the spread of nuclear weapon in Iran and North Korea, shut down terrorist financing systems in Saudi Arabia, break U.S. dependence on Mideast oil, and broker peace between Israel and Palestine. He talked of boosting homeland security, reaching out to the Muslim world with American ideals and promoting democracy within Muslim nations.

Trouble is, there isn't one item on that list that also isn't in Bush's post-Sept. 11 program.

The same difficulty applies to Iraq. I'm sure John Kerry would love to make American's think his plan is as day to Bush's night. But reality there is a shade of twilight. The difference is the one Ben Franklin pondered at the Constitutional Convention: is that sun rising or setting?

Compared to Bush's combination of "stay-the-course" toughness and "eyes-on-the-prize" optimism, Kerry's pessimistic rhetoric about a land fallen into "chaos" is probably closer to the present reality. It sees too much darkness, though. Much of Iraq is calm and stable and advancing. Cheney was right to scold him for talking only about the darkness, though not for criticizing the administration.

As anyone with sense could have told you, it will take a generation to establish civil order and indigenous democratic government across Iraq (as it did in the American states after the Revolution or the South after the Civil War). Yet there's too much violence, and its too widespread, for anyone to pretend Iraq is going according to plan right now.

Bush is a bungling mediocrity. However, Kerry's claim that a fresh administration is the answer is just as pollyanaish as Bush is held to be. A new administration could be a benefit. Any change of players at this point probably will give the U.S. a bounce.

Yet as the "Economist" wrote recently, the Republican team has made just about every mistake possible, but the result is that the plan they now have in place, honed by these tragic mistakes, is about as good as anyone could devise for the present reality.

Bush has chopped and changed his approach many times since the invasion. But the plan now in place makes perfect sense on paper, enjoys a fair amount of support inside Iraq and has been formally adopted by the U.N. Security Council. Under it, the U.N.-appointed interim government of Iyad Allawi is supposed to hold the ring until a U.N.-supervised election takes place next January. The government thus elected then has the job of drawing up a new constitution and holding a new election under its rules in early 2006.

Kerry does not question any of this, promising only to be more effective than Bush in enabling it all to happen. But most of the enabling steps he proposes are things the present administration is already trying to do: beefing up Iraq's fledgling army and police force, rebuilding the economy and making sure that January's promised election will be credible.

As for Kerry's claim that once he is in the White House other nations will gallop to America's rescue in Iraq, this is whistling in the wind. If the violence continues at its present level, it will be hard enough for any American president to stop the existing dwindling band of helpers from bolting, let alone persuade new ones to put soldiers and civilians in harm's way.

The problem is not the plan. The problem is the ability of the plan to survive the determination of the "insurgents" to bring it down. As repeated attempts in Palestine have revealed, plans are fragile things. But, as the "Economist" notes, the first phase of the American project has produced a pleasant surprise success in the person of Prime Minister Allawi.

In some ways, Allawi has been a success. He has a robust — some say autocratic — style of leadership. He has genuinely taken over many of the decision-making powers previously exercised by the Americans through their now-departed proconsul, Paul Bremer. When American forces undertake big military operations, such as the recent siege around the Shia holy town of Najaf, it is he who calls many of the shots. But however much this change of guard may be welcomed by ordinary Iraqis, it has not improved security. If anything, the insurgency appears to have waxed ever stronger.

It's a start. The hard question now emerging from the haze of the near future is whether comprehensive elections can be held in Iraq, giving it a true national government, before the violence is stemmed and the Islamist terrorist ratholes retaken. Or whether it would be better to let the peaceful provinces form a government on their own.

American forces have the raw power to smash their way into Fallujah tomorrow. But what then? Launching an offensive at the behest of a mere appointee such as Allawi would be a far more dangerous undertaking than doing so on the orders of a government that will have been elected, however imperfectly, by millions of Iraqis.

Indeed, such an election could be a transforming event. It will not bring tranquility at a stroke: Turning Iraq into the model democracy of Bush's dreams is a job that will take years, if it is possible at all. But holding an election is the crucial first step if Iraq is to be saved from the war without end that Kerry fears. All of America's efforts there should now be bent toward this aim.

And that's something that I want the two candidates to agree on, as much as I want to have a real debate about America's policy in Iraq. But that's not possible if too many of us are frozen in anger at exactly the moment we decided to topple Saddam, and still stalking around the country shouting it was all a mistake and acting like Iraq is a bad dream that, if we wish really hard, we can wake up from on November 2.

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