What To Expect

Recall then Lt. Kerry’s words before the 1971 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.

Insert the words “Iraq,” “terrorism” and “terrorists” for “Vietnam,” “communism” and “communists” into this segment of the testimony and this could have been part of a Kerry speech from last week.

Senator Kerry’s views on deployment of US Forces in combat seem not to have changed from their 1971 state. At last, something on which the senator hasn’t done the “flip-flop.”

So we should admit that Iraq was a mistake and pull out, using the Vietnam example, because we can’t fight terrorism all over the world, right Senator? Or perhaps we should go back (again) and beg our “real” allies to help us out. The problem with that, Senator, is that just today, France and Germany told you to kiss their collective rosy-reds (apparently the job you’re doing at present in that area isn’t quite up to par). They won’t send troops into Iraq whether George W. Bush asks them to or you do (not even under the NATO banner).

So now whatchu gon’ do?

*****

I have wondered here (humorously) how much contact Senator Kerry has had with military personnel between his discharge from the Navy Reserves and the onset of his campaign for president. Little to none is the probable answer and even if that answer is wrong, one wonders whether the senator asked any substantive questions about service other than comparing an individual member’s medals and/or ribbons to his own. In spite of the facts of his own service, the senator seems to understand little about how most military personnel view being sent into combat.

Jed Babbin at NRO:

If Kerry wanted to demoralize our forces, he would say little that's different from what he is saying now. As he continues to tack with the breeze, it's clear that there is no underlying principle that guides him, no resolve in his mind that the lives lost should not have been in vain. Kerry's message does not promise the men and women who are risking their lives that their sacrifices will buy anything different from what dozens of lives bought in Somalia [nothing except for Osama bin Laden’s escalation of the scope of his attack, culminating in 9/11]. Instead, Kerry says that we want to turn Iraq over to others, and bug out. Our troops' morale — as best I can gauge it — is not down. They're not happy about doing what they're committed to do: No one wants to fight or suffer or die. But their morale depends on the resolve and commitment of their commander in chief, and the bond of trust between them and the president. If their morale isn't down yet, it will sink more and more as they think about what Kerry would do as president. They know he will not finish the job.

If the job is abandoned as the fruits of a colossal error, those thousand men and women will indeed collectively become “the last man [sic] to die for a mistake” by the hand of the man who will be chosen to be president this year, which ever man that is.

(Thanks to LGF)

Comments

[Noble Eagle]

Kerry & Company insist that Iraq is another Vietnam, and they'll do anything in their power to see that it is.

The one thing Kerry has been consistent on (besides marrying rich women) is that he will do everything in his power to lower the morale of our troops and embolden our enemies.

[kate]

The one thing Kerry has been consistant about is claiming to be better at diplomacy. However he has consistantly insulted both our coalition partners and his preferred allies. First, by claiming he could negotiate the French, Germans and Russians into actively supporting us, he inferred that they had chosen to obstruct us for petty reasons not for their own states' interest as they saw it. Now he claims he can talk them into taking up the burden - not for geopolitical reasons, not for moral or humane reasons, not for their own interests but to let us off the hook, let them pay in lives and tax dollars to lose the war. Sure that'll sell well "Hey, I've got what I'm absolutely sure is a quagmire and I want to sell you a large bit of it!" And then he goes and derides the PM of Iraq. Is there any country he has not yet alienated or alerted to his con? perhaps he thinks they all get new leaders the same day we do? and that they will be as obtuse as he is?

[Pearl]

When I heard his speech, I thought I was having a flashback.

I will not sit quietly this time while this man once again tries to malign our military men and women. The last time Kerry did this, he endangered lives. Now he is seeking to do it again. What I want to know is WHY????

I cannot appreciate a Commander In Chief with so little disregard for those who serve.

[John Salmon]

It's unfair to say Kerry has been inconsistent on Iraq. Of course he's been all over the map in his public statements, but in his heart he always has been and always will be a dove. Kerry clearly wanted to vote against against the war resolution, just as he voted against the first Gulf War, but felt it was politically impossible to do so. His thinking, shaped by his perception of Viet Nam, took on a rigidity that makes him wholy unsuited to the dangerous world we now face. Has a major party's Presidential candidate ever been less qualified to be Commander in Chief, in a time of war? The best historical corollaries might be the disastrous pre-Civil War Presidencies of Buchanan and Pierce.

[David Blue]

Kate: "perhaps he thinks they all get new leaders the same day we do?" His sister has done her best to arrange something like that.

I don't want guys like this to win.

I can't believe we'll ever vote for such trash. I've said before there's no way known the Americans will vote for a four year Vietnam flashback over a functioning presidency, so there's nothing to worry about.

But I'll feel happier when the elections are done and the good guys have won. Roll on the 3rd of November, 2004, when I hope and trust we'll all be celebrating.

[David Blue]

PS: Oh, but don't question their patriotism ...

[jeff]

The situation with Hussein was untenable. We had a certain set of information, & that's all we had. To suggest that he would have been no danger unmolested is sheer fantasy. Even the 9/11 Commission found contacts between the Hussein regime & Al Qaeda thruout the 90s, culiminating in an offer to give OBL safe haven. In this situation, was was the least worst option. Those kids are not dying in vain.

[jeff]

Remind me to use the preview next time. Correction: "War" was the least worst option

[DaveP.]

Recently one of the Deep Cable channels ran a documentary on the Ranger raid in Mogadishu that was immortalized in the book and movie, "Black Hawk Down". They interviewed many of the survivors of the disaster. Many of them felt that by surviving Atta's ambush and slaughtering as many of their assailants as they did- and escaping- they had won a victory. Most if not all admitted to a deep and abiding sense of betrayal that the Clinton administration had pulled all American forces out immediately, effectively announcing abject defeat and admitting that a two-bit warlord and a batch of starveling thugs could attack American soldiers without retaliation and strategically defeat the elite of the world's best army as easily as that. The image left behind was that Americans were cowards, who would not accept the political consequences of military losses and therefore would not risk dangerous military operations. This was part of the logic that Bin Laden used when he assured his followers that there would be no reprisals for September 11.
What lesson does Kerry think the future Bin Ladens- and the rest of the world- would learn from his cringing and fawning, if he got a chance to enact his stated 'goals' for Iraq as President?

[baldilocks]

I don't think Senator Kerry is a student of history, Dave P.

[kate]

First thing: I should have written "implied" instead of "inferred". I inferred; he implied. Scary- I now know I have a subliminal editor. My first thought this morning was I had used the wrong word.
Second thing: I think Kerry's obsession with Viet Nam is just part of his nostalgia for the emotional high of the 60's. Think about the ideals and issues of the young adult crowd of the 60's. Think about the emotion. and think about the self-righteousness that fed both their egos and their emotions. But they won all the big issues then - civil rights, VietNam,the welfare state. Everyone was Keynesian, even Nixon, and they got rid of him and corruption with a capital C. Then what- no great hurdles, no emotional highs, just real life and reality nibbling away at their good intentions. Kerry wants now to be as emotionally satisfying as it was then. He is "Glory Days" with a national audience. And his most vociferous supporters are stuck back there too for the same reasons.

[kate]

David:
What a horrible man! I hope the Aussies will give him the trouncing he deserves.

While I am hopeful, given the polls in the US recently, I am not confident. Too many voters I know are themselves flipfloppers. Too many have VietNam-as-inevitable-quagmire as their default mode. And way too many are only paying superficial attention to the facts. And these are not ABB folks. They are non-ideological, regular neighbor folk. And it has rained so much which always makes me more pessimistic. ( I am in GA - we don't get the blast, just the downpour)

[teal marie]

I wasn't expecting Kerry to go on Orange-Alert! I shoulda had faith in his vanity that he'd do something cosmetic to prepare for his debate with Bush. That it would backfire so disastrously is an omen, I tell you.
I'm a Democrat, I have the LLL's permission to be shallow.

[DaveP.]

Bleah. I'm not usually that longwinded. It's just that... if we push through, if we install the Iraqis as the citizens of their own country (instead of as the subjects), than the losses we suffered will have been for SOMETHING; if we Kerryize Iraq- surrender it to Europeans with every stake in seeing another strongman there, pull up stakes and run home for only domestic political reasons- then there will have been no meaning to that sacrifice. If we lose we lose- at least we fought. We'll also have abandoned a NATION of people who thought we would save them... but that's not new to Kerry.

"History doesn't always repeat itself- smetimes it just screams, 'Why can't you pay ATTENTION!' and lets fly with a club."
--John W. Campbell

[torchy]

Kerry went orange playing football or consulting with his Dark Master about Daniel Webster bargaining tactics in the fiery reaches of Hell, BWAHAHAHAHA

[kate]

Dave,
if we leave Iraq it is not just Iraq which will get worse. The anti-west will have a huge victory to bludgeon the people with. The people will be too terrorized to resist and they will know that no help is coming. But look at a map of the Arab/Muslim world. The US and its allies have broken it up at the core. There are US troops on 2 sides of Iran, on the border of Saudi Arabia, on the other side of Syria from Isreal. Which Arab/Muslim (Iran is Persian not Arab) states are the most dangerous? Those we have forces in or next to. By invading Iraq the US broke up the flow, took down a major enemy, released our military from the static but dangerous "oversight" mission, removed US soldiers from SA (reducing tensions with moderate Muslims) and placed our military ready for an invasion of any of the other big 3. This is why the war on Iraq was the right war in the right place at the right time and why it was the next logical move in the WOT. Preventing SH from using either his wealth or his WMDs against us was a bennie and propogating freedom in an incredibly unfree area is both a short term tactic against the big 3 and THE long term strategy which is our best hope for the end of the war.