NEGROPONTE'S REPLACEMENT?:

Kerry adrift (Charles Krauthammer, 4/23/04, Jewish World Review)

"If I'm president," John Kerry said, "I will not only personally go to the U.N., I will go to other capitals." For Kerry, showing up at Kofi Annan's doorstep and sweeping through allied capitals is no rhetorical flourish, no strategic sideshow. It is the essence of his Iraq plan: "Within weeks of being inaugurated, I will return to the U.N. and I will literally, formally rejoin the community of nations and turn over a proud new chapter in America's relationship with the world."

This is an Iraq policy? Never has a more serious question received a more feckless answer. Going back to the U.N.: What does that mean? It cannot mean the General Assembly, which decides nothing. It must mean going back to the Security Council.

There are five permanent members. We are one. The British are already with us. So that leaves China, indifferent at best to our Middle East adventure, though generally hostile, and Russia, which has opposed the war from the very beginning. Moscow was so wedded to Saddam Hussein that it was doing everything it could to prevent an impartial Paul Volcker commission from investigating the corrupt oil-for-food program that enriched Hussein and, through kickbacks, hundreds of others in dozens of countries, including Russia.

That leaves . . . France. What does Kerry think France will do for us? Perhaps he sees himself and Teresa descending on Paris like Jack and Jackie in Camelot days. Does he really believe that if he grovels before Jacques Chirac in well-accented French, France will join us in a war that it has opposed from the beginning, that is now going badly, and that has moved Iraq out of the French sphere of influence and into the American?

The idea is so absurd that when Tim Russert interviewed Kerry and quoted Democratic foreign policy adviser Ivo Daalder as saying that handing political and military responsibility to the United Nations and other countries is not realistic, Kerry simply dodged the question. There was nothing to say.

Why not just appoint Mr. Kerry UN Ambassador? Then he'd get to hang with his French buddies and the Security Council would like us again.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 23, 2004 9:13 AM