Good stuff on Kerry’s “nuanced” policy positions.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp#001358
NUANCED? OR JUST PLAN NONSENSE? [08/11 08:52 AM]
It’s easy to get mired in the daily back-and-forth of the campaign and to lose sight of the big picture: How a potential president would handle the life-and-death issues of war and peace.
Perhaps this is the right time to closely reexamine Kerry’s plans for Iraq, based on his recent statement that he would have gone to war in Iraq, even if he had known there were no WMDs and no direct ties between Iraq and 9/11 (notice the distinction between ties to 9/11 and ties to al Qaeda).
Specifically, Kerry was asked whether he would support the war “knowing what we know now” about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that U.S. and British officials were certain were there. In response, Kerry said: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.”
A mind of insufficient sophistication might conclude that this comment renders moot Kerry’s insistence that “We were misled about weapons of mass destruction,” as he said in March.
Or his charge that “we were misled in very specific terms about the evidence that we were showed within those briefings to the Congress of the United States” might appear, at first glance, to be rendered irrelevant if a President Kerry would have made the same choice. But this is not the case.
For example, there are many who erroneously believe that Kerry has pledged to never use the doctrine of preemption.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200407161724.asp
These Kerry critics might have gotten that wrong notion from Kerry’s statement to the Boston Globe on February 28 that, “President Bush’s policy of “unilateral preemption” had failed to win the war on terror and only fueled anti-American anger worldwide.” Or his speech before the Council on Foreign Relations last December, when he said, “We have a President who has developed and exalted a strategy of war ? unilateral; pre-emptive; and in my view, profoundly threatening to America’s place in the world and the safety and prosperity of our own society.” Or his comment on Meet the Press last December, when he said, “I did not buy into preemption…I thought that was wrong… [The doctrine of preemption] is the most arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological foreign policy in modern history.”
But to conclude from those statements that Kerry opposes preemption would be a simplistic, non-nuanced, and probably “neocon” interpretation. As Kerry made clear in mid-July, he would be willing to launch a preemptive strike against terrorists if he had adequate intelligence of a threat. “Am I prepared as president to go get them before they get us if we locate them and have the sufficient intelligence? You bet I am.”
You see, Kerry has always approached the issue of handling Saddam Hussein with a nimble-minded flexibility, an ability to adapt to changing conditions. Way back on January 22, 1991, he wrote to a constituent, Wallace Carter of Newton Centre, Mass.:
Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition ... to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On January 11, I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president the immediate authority to go to war.
But Kerry is no blind peacenik, as demonstrated by his January 31, 1991 letter, also to Wallace Carter, stating:
Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf.
“Strong and unequivocal” is exactly the term that comes to mind when considering Kerry and the issue of Iraq, and the broader war on terror.
For example, he explained to Tim Russert on Meet the Press in February, “It’s basically a manhunt. You gotta know who they are, where they are, what they’re planning, and you gotta be able to go get 'em before they get us.”
But only a fool would conclude from those comments that Kerry believes the war on terror is a manhunt. As he put it in a speech at UCLA two weeks later, “This war isn’t just a manhunt ? a checklist of names from a deck of cards. In it, we do not face just one man or one terrorist group. We face a global jihadist movement of many groups, from different sources, with separate agendas, but all committed to assaulting the United States and free and open societies around the globe.”
Back on March 18, 2003, when America stood at the brink of war, Kerry was clear that President Bush’s impatience was the reason for war, not Saddam Hussein. “The Administration’s indifference to diplomacy and the manner in which it has treated friend and foe alike over the past several months have left this country with vastly reduced influence throughout the world, made impossible the assembly of a broad, multinational effort against Saddam Hussein, and dramatically increased the costs of fulfilling our legitimate security obligations at home and around the world.”
Diplomacy is an unexhausted, potential solution, Kerry made clear. And yet, his faith in it is not endless, as revealed by his February 2, 2002, comment expressing skepticism that diplomacy with Saddam Hussein would get anywhere. Kerry told Chris Matthews that Saddam “would view himself only as buying time and playing a game in my judgment.”
The future course of a Kerry administration is clear. It is also apparently secret, and those of us not in Kerry’s inner circle are not entitled to know about it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200408020840.asp
But that is appropriate. We can take solace in the Democratic candidate’s comments that, “The key at this point is to have a stable, nonfailed state that is moving towards democracy and security sufficient for the government to stand on its own. And for its own forces to stand up for that government. I have a plan for how we can get there. I’m not going to negotiate my plan in the newspapers or publicly… I will provide for the world’s need not to have a failed state in Iraq.” Or back in May, when Kerry explained, “It will not take long to do what is necessary,” he said. “I’m not going to give you a specific date, but I’ll tell you that I have a plan, and I will put that plan in place.”
It’s easy to dismiss this as flip-flopping, but clearly studying Kerry’s positions long enough, we can discern a coherent logic. No man as smart as Kerry would just make up his policies as he goes along. No, it takes a nuanced, sophisticated mind to grasp the emanating penumbras of these statements, and understand that if in office, a President Kerry would chart a clear course of…
Oh, who am I kidding? These policy statements are a joke. This is incoherent. Add more troops to Iraq? Pull them out? Preemptively attack other rogue states? Discard the doctrine of preemption? Treat the war on terrorism as an “intelligence and law enforcement” issue, or keep military options on the table? Who the heck can tell with all this contradictory rhetorical jumble?
This. Is. Gobbledygook.
Some people mock Bush’s incoherence because he turns “nuclear” into a three-syllable word and says things like, “I’m honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.” But nobody doubts what Bush stands for, and that makes it easy to debate his policies. You know what his plan is, and you can argue whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea. That’s more or less the way our elections are supposed to work.
Kerry’s incoherent, sort-of-for, sort-of-against, shapeless gray blobs of linguistic ooze make debating his views impossible, because there’s nothing to support or to dispute. Kerry never comes out and clearly and consistently advocates one position that the voters can either endorse or reject. As the public mood shifts, so does he. And he always leaves the wiggle room, the subordinate clause with caveats that nullifies the original statement.
It’s enough to make a guy miss Howard Dean.