HE MAY BE CRAVEN, BUT HE'S NOT A COMPLETE IDIOT:

Kerry endorses Bush's unilateralist agenda (Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy In Focus)

Democratic US presidential nominee John Kerry's foreign-policy speech at New York University (NYU) has been widely hailed as a long-overdue effort to place some daylight between himself and the incumbent president, George W Bush, regarding Iraq. In his September 20 address, the Massachusetts senator appropriately took the president to task for launching the war prematurely, mishandling the occupation, misleading the US public regarding the deteriorating situation on the ground, and pursuing policies that have weakened America's security interests.

However, the speech also contained a number of disturbing elements regarding how Kerry would handle Iraq as president and why he voted to authorize the invasion in the first place. More disturbingly, Kerry's speech appears to endorse the Bush administration's efforts to undermine the United Nations and international law and its penchant for unilaterally imposing US military force in contravention of international norms.

Despite Kerry's belated acknowledgement that the war was a mistake, he insists that now "we must do everything in our power to complete the mission ... [and] get the job done". This sounds disturbingly familiar to the line Americans heard during the late 1960s and early 1970s by supposed "moderates" who argued that, while the US should never have become embroiled in the Vietnam conflict, "now that we're there, we need to stay and finish the job".

The nearest thing Kerry seems to offer in terms of a withdrawal strategy is the Iraqi equivalent of "Vietnamization", encouraging the government that Washington installed in Baghdad to train more Iraqis to kill Iraqis so as to minimize the number of US casualties. Kerry says it could take about four years to complete the process, which is the same amount of time between Richard Nixon's inauguration as president in January 1969 and the Paris Peace Agreement in January 1973, among the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War. Kerry, then, is in essence proposing four more years of war. One can only think of John Kerry as a young veteran in 1971 testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asking: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Kerry has long emphasized that he could bring in allies to help the United States fight this bloody urban insurgency, citing the Bush administration's arrogant and dismissive treatment of allies regarding US policy toward Iraq. Kerry, however, has shown the same kind of arrogance: when the newly elected government of Spain announced last spring that it would fulfill its long-standing promise to withdraw its forces from Iraq unless the mission were placed under the United Nations, Kerry responded by saying, "I call on Prime Minister [Jose Luis Rodriguez] Zapatero to reconsider his decision and to send a message that terrorists cannot win by their act of terror." To Kerry, apparently, if a government insists that there be a UN mandate in place before it participates in the occupation of a foreign country, it is sending the wrong message to terrorists.

As the Senator's frantic back-pedaling from his own "global test" rhetoric amply demonstrates, even Democrats recognize that to propose that American action can only be justified by UN mandate would destroy their party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 6, 2004 10:07 PM