GIVING WILLY LOMAN A RUN FOR HIS MONEY:

DAMAGE CONTROL: Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track. (PHILIP GOUREVITCH, 2004-07-19, The New Yorker)

During the loneliest days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, last December, when he was trailing Al Sharpton in some polls and reporters covering the race were placing bets that he’d drop out before the first voters were heard from in the Iowa caucuses, Senator John Kerry came to New York to address the Council on Foreign Relations. It was hard, then, to find anyone outside his immediate family who would speak with unaverted eyes of the likelihood of a Kerry comeback. Even among the Democrats in his audience, which was packed with soberly tailored politicians, diplomats, military officers, and captains of finance, industry, philanthropy, and think tanks, there was a sense of near-certitude—for some delightful, for others grim—that Howard Dean was unstoppable. As a governor, Dean had been spared having to take sides when the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq was passed in both houses of Congress, in October of 2002, and he’d made himself a scourge to his rivals in the primary race who voted for it. He called them “Bush Lite.” Kerry’s deeply recessed eyes, small as an elephant’s, appeared more than usually narrowed in those days, and his smile, too, had tightened into the sort of skeptical wince that a cartoon dad displays to signal his endurance of adolescent noise. But he didn’t waste a word on Dean when he addressed the council.

Kerry had stayed up late for several nights, crafting his speech, and it was as succinct and cogent a summation of his case against the President as he has offered to date. “Simply put,” Kerry declared, “the Bush Administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history”:

In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the world rallied to the common cause of fighting terrorism. But President Bush has squandered that historic moment. . . . He rushed into battle—and he went almost alone. . . . I believed a year ago and I believe now that we had to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and that we needed to lead in that effort. But this Administration did it in the worst possible way: without the United Nations, without our allies, without a plan to win the peace. So we are left asking: How is it possible to liberate a country, depose a ruthless dictator who at least in the past had weapons of mass destruction, and convert a preordained success into a diplomatic fiasco? How is it possible to do what the Bush Administration has done in Iraq: win a great military victory yet make America weaker?

Kerry called on the Administration to “swallow its pride” and do what it should have done in the first place: bring in the U.N. and the “international community” to help America succeed instead of inviting failure alone.

Americans are understandably made nervous by the daily violence in Iraq and by the likelihood that George W. Bush has further plans for forcibly liberalizing the Middle East, but what Mr. Gourevitch refers to here as "on track"--entwining our policy with the UN's--is a path that Americans have at all times in our history found abhorrent. Opponents of Mr. Bush could sell the nation on isolation, they can never sell greater internationalization of our security policy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2004 4:01 PM