Kerry's Temple Mount
We haven't returned to the subject of John Kerry's September 24 speech at Temple University. The speech is Kerry's most sustained effort to articulate his view of the broader war in which we are engaged. He formulates his view of the broader war as follows:
I begin with this belief: The war on terror is as monumental a struggle as the Cold War. Its outcome will determine whether we and our children live in freedom or in fear. It is not, as some people think, a clash of civilizations. Radical Islamic fundamentalism is not the true face of Islam. This is a clash between civilization and the enemies of civilization; between humanity’s best hopes and most primitive fears. The danger we face today will become even greater if the terrorists acquire what we know they are seeking – weapons of mass destruction, which they would use to commit mass murder. We are confronting an enemy and an ideology that must be destroyed. We are in a war that must be won.After taking liberties with the statements of President Bush and other officials regarding the progress of the war, Kerry states:
I will wage this war relentlessly with a single-minded determination: to capture or kill the terrorists, crush their movement and free the world from fear. To destroy our enemy, we have to know our enemy. We have to understand that we are facing a radical fundamentalist movement with global reach and a very specific plan. They are not just out to kill us for the sake of killing us. They want to provoke a conflict that will radicalize the people of the Muslim world, turning them against the United States and the West. And they hope to transform that anger into a force that will topple the region’s governments and pave the way for a new empire, an oppressive, fundamentalist superstate stretching across a vast area from Europe to Africa, from the Middle East to Central Asia.Kerry of course vows to wage a stronger, smarter version of the war; he somehow omits his previous vow to wage it more sensitively as well. In its particulars -- by emphasizing the need for border control and a larger Army, by asserting that he, unlike President Bush, "would hold the Saudis accountable" -- Kerry attempts to position himself to President Bush's right. Certain aspects of Kerry's "plan," such as legal action to block terrorist financing, have been made possible by the USA PATRIOT Act and have been pursued aggressively by the Bush administration. Other aspects result in calls for pure pork sausage that put one in mind of Jimmy Dean.
In his critique of the war in Iraq, however, Kerry sounds like Howard Dean (remember, children, "W" stands for wrong):
Instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan…the President rushed to a new war in Iraq. That was the wrong choice.Kerry thus positions himself both to the president's left and to his right. Call it the Kerry straddle.Instead of listening to the uniformed military, his own State Department, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, and outside experts about how to win the peace in Iraq… the President hitched his wagon to the ideologues who told him our troops would be welcomed as liberators. That was the wrong choice.
I am struck by how little discussion Kerry's speech has occasioned. Kerry's critique of the broader war seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Is there any voter who can square Kerry's vote in favor of the war in Iraq with Kerry's current critique, or any voter seeking a more vigorous prosecution of the war who would choose John Kerry to lead the charge?
Perhaps Kerry's left-right one-two punch is his Whitmanesque effort to embrace the contradictions among his own supporters regarding the war. Kerry's left-right one-two punch seems to leave President Bush in the triangulated middle of Kerry's debate with himself.
HINDROCKET adds: I wrote nearly a year ago that there was plenty of room on the President's right on the war, and if the Democrats were smart they would go there, but I predicted that, being Democrats, they would never be able to bring themselves to do it. Three-quarters of Kerry's Temple speech represents the kind of tough talk the Democrats should have engaged in all along, and in places it's very good. The problem is that the main theater of the war right now is Iraq, and what to do in that country is the urgent question of the moment. Given Kerry's dovish position on Iraq, he has no credibility when he says that in all other aspects of the war, he would be a hawk. I think that's the basic reason why the Temple speech has gotten so little attention. It seems reasonable to assume that everything he says other than the part on Iraq is window-dressing.
