The Democrats’ Plan B

We’ve always known that if the Iraq war was unsuccessful, the Democrats would use its failure to campaign against President Bush. But earlier today, Sen. John Kerry–confronted by the unpleasant (to him) reality that the U.S. is winning the war–tried out a new theory on an audience in New Hampshire: “Regardless of how successful the United States is in waging war against Iraq, it will take a new president to rebuild the country’s damaged relationships with the rest of the world.”
Kerry said the President “should have given diplomacy more time and his failure to do so has alienated America’s allies.” Given what we now know about the intransigence of France and Russia, Kerry offered no explanation as to how giving diplomacy more time could have been productive. And we would argue that our allies haven’t been “alienated,” they’ve been identified.
With himself as President, Kerry looks forward to a “golden age of diplomacy” in which the U.S. would “[approach] the United Nations with an aggressive plan to make the United States a leader on international, environmental and health issues without ceding its right to defend itself.” Only ceding its sovereignty, in other words.
It sounds like a pretty lame approach to me, but we’ll see what the Democratic primary voters make of it.

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