Richard Bennett

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.

There’s no question that John Kerry’s a much better debater than the President, and that he did much better in tonight’s debate. The President was over-prepared, sticking to his talking points instead of taking Kerry down on his many lies, distortions, and sheer flights of fancy.

But the larger question is whether the undecideds who watched were looking for a captain for the school debate team or for a leader of the free world. On that score, it seems to me that when the dust settles in the next few days most of them are not going to feel any more comfortable with Kerry than they were yesterday. His plans for Iraq are impossibly vague and fanciful, his position on North Korea is obviously wrong, and his relationships with world leaders, if he has any, aren’t going to reap him the kind of bonanza that he got from marrying a pair of rich heiresses.

But we’ll see. The snap polls are telling one message pretty clearly: Kerry won the debate, but he didn’t move ahead in the polls. ABC in particular showed him taking the debate by ten points while remaining 4 points behind the President, as each candidate gained one point.

ABC now has the President leading 51-47.

While we’re on the subject, see Marc Cooper on the left’s intellectual fatwa against Christopher Hitchens and its tolerance of Kim Il Sung and Slobo Milosevic, not to mention Saddam.

Link via Mr. Totten.

Al Qaeda must have been overjoyed by Kerry official Joe Lockhart’s attack on Allawi:

“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips,” said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser.

How many lives will be lost because of this remark?

Apparently CBS producer Mary Mapes thinks she’s above the law where the Oklahoma City bomber was concerned.

Charlese Krauthammer offers a lesson in history:

Of all our allies in the world, which is the only one to have joined the United States in the foxhole in every war in the past 100 years? Not Britain, not Canada, certainly not France. The answer is Australia.

So who is the Kerry campaign bashing this week? That’s right, Australian prime minister John Howard, in a way that borders on treason. It gets worse: see Instapundit.

Bob Novak, AKA “Prince of Darkness”, opines that the President wants to cut and run from Iraq soon after the election. He should read the President’s remarks at the UN and digest them:

Our coalition is standing beside a growing Iraqi security force. The NATO Alliance is providing vital training to that force. More than 35 nations have contributed money and expertise to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure. And as the Iraqi interim government moves toward national elections, officials from the United Nations are helping Iraqis build the infrastructure of democracy. These selfless people are doing heroic work, and are carrying on the great legacy of Sergio de Mello.

As we have seen in other countries, one of the main terrorist goals is to undermine, disrupt, and influence election outcomes. We can expect terrorist attacks to escalate as Afghanistan and Iraq approach national elections. The work ahead is demanding. But these difficulties will not shake our conviction that the future of Afghanistan and Iraq is a future of liberty. The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail.

The advance of freedom always carries a cost, paid by the bravest among us. America mourns the losses to our nation, and to many others. And today, I assure every friend of Afghanistan and Iraq, and every enemy of liberty: We will stand with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes of freedom and security are fulfilled.

These two nations will be a model for the broader Middle East, a region where millions have been denied basic human rights and simple justice. For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived. We must take a different approach. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.

It seems pretty clear to me that the President has no intention of cutting out before the work is done in either Afghanistan or Iraq.