Marty Peretz points to the shaky foundations of the Kerry “plan” for Iraq
In an editorial in last week’s New Republic, we wrote that “to win reelection, Bush is lying” about Iraq. I have no qualms about that assertion. But now Kerry has spoken definitively about Iraq as well, at New York University and elsewhere. His speeches have produced a flurry of hosannas. Tnr put a headline on its cover, echoing a phrase in Kerry’s address, that proclaimed there was, “finally, a real debate on iraq.” But only Ryan Lizza, in last week’s issue, termed Kerry’s prescriptions what they really are: “fantastic,” used in its correct meaning–that is, extravagantly fanciful, capricious, grotesque. So, if Bush is lying about Iraq, so is Kerry. It’s not just that he has exaggerated what has gone wrong in Iraq. His entire speech was premised on the assumption that there were European troops and Muslim troops and United Nations gendarmes who would have gone to war with us against Saddam had Bush only waited another few days, weeks, months in the spring of 2003. That is a lie. And now, he holds out the same false promise. It is true, he admits, that there is a Security Council resolution calling on U.N. members to provide soldiers and trainers and a special brigade to protect the U.N. mission in Iraq. “Three months later,” he admits, “not a single country has answered that call.” Of course, Bush is to blame. And what should Bush do? He should “convene a summit meeting of the world’s major powers” and “insist that they make good on that U.N. resolution.”
There is something risible in Kerry’s faith in these hopeless transactions brokered by Kofi Annan and in the United Nations itself, which is staging yet another tragic, do-nothing performance on Darfur.
We saw a stark contrast in last night’s debate between the Kerry fantasy and the Bush plan for Iraq: Bush wants to continue training the Iraqis to take over their country, while Kerry wants to replace American troops with French and German ones.
How can anybody take Kerry seriously when France and Germany have both said they’re sending no troops to Iraq regardless of who wins the election? And if they did, is prolonging the foreign occupation the key to victory in Iraq?
Wrong war indeed; Kerry’s still fighting Vietnam but he’s doing it in Iraq:
If Kerry had not had such a tortured history on Vietnam and on Iraq, he might have run as a straightforward antiwar candidate and simply said: We are getting out.
Instead, Kerry is offering to magically get allies to replace us while accelerating Iraqification. (Does he imagine the administration is operating at anything less than breakneck speed to transfer the burden from U.S. soldiers to Iraqis?) In 1968 Richard Nixon ran and won on a similar platform — Vietnamization — and got us out of Vietnam almost precisely by the end of his first presidential term.
Nixon, remember, was vilified by Kerry and his antiwar colleagues for prolonging the suffering and dying in Vietnam for four unnecessary years. Yet here is Kerry, after 30 years of torturous reexamination of Vietnam, coming full circle and running as Nixon 1968: mysterious plan, Iraqification, out in four years. A novelist could not have written this tale. It would be too implausible.
That was Krauthammer.