Friday, August 06, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: What Sen. Kerry believes

Does his 'secret plan' for Iraq involve ... the Belgians?

In 1952, Dwight David Eisenhower was running behind Democratic heir-apparent Adlai Stevenson when he promised to "concentrate on the job of ending the Korea war. ...

"That job requires a personal trip to Korea," he said. "I shall go to Korea."

Incumbent Harry S Truman called the pledge a "desperate attempt to get votes." When Eisenhower actually did go to Korea between his Election Day victory and his inauguration, Truman called it "a piece of demagoguery."

But Eisenhower did oversee the 1953 Korean War armistice.

Fifteen years later, borrowing a page from Eisenhower's playbook, his political understudy Richard Nixon sought to capitalize on anti-war fervor -- the same fervor that first brought young Lt. John Kerry to the public's attention -- when he vowed during his second try for the presidency in 1968 that he had his own "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War.

It may have been a secret plan, but it turned out to be no magic potion. Negotiations were launched but dragged on; the "Vietnamization" of the war that followed was largely a face-saving sham.

The Vietnam War did not end till after Nixon resigned -- and it did not end well, for those who consider communism imposed at gunpoint to be a bad result.

Now, John Kerry, a decorated veteran of that conflict, "reminds some of Nixon when he talks of vague deals with foreign leaders" to disentangle us from Iraq, reports The Associated Press.

"I don't care what it sounds like," Mr. Kerry tells ABC. "The fact is that I'm not going to negotiate in public today without the presidency."

But what does Mr. Kerry mean when he says he can "put a deal together" as president to drastically reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq?

Like so much of modern presidential politics -- but particularly the brand adopted out of necessity by the furthest-left Democrats, whose specific plans don't tend to poll well -- the game here seems to be a good bit of winking and nudging to Mr. Kerry's followers on the isolationist left, without saying anything specific enough to be used against him by the right.

Mr. Kerry "is pinning blame" for the problems in Iraq "on President Bush and his shaky relationships with allies who have refused to support U.S. troops with soldiers of their own," The AP reports. "The four-term Massachusetts senator suggests he has back-channel assurances that foreign leaders would do more if he were president."

Ah, once they see a President Kerry in office, the job of establishing a pluralistic, non-sectarian Republic in Iraq -- a bulwark against more fundamentalist terrorism of the type so dramatically displayed on 9-11 -- will be quickly accomplished by the timely arrival of Sen. Kerry's pals, the sharply honed combat brigades of France, Belgium and Andorra?

There seems little doubt the decadent European powers, who successfully appealed to America to save their bacon after embroiling themselves in two massively destructive wars in the past century, would rather have an American president who defers to their "wisdom and experience" -- donning a beret and joshing with them over the brie and Chablis -- than the president they currently revile as a "cowboy" because he insists on taking dramatic actions based on what he sees as America's own best interests ... rather than theirs.

But the question here is not whether the hand-waving, excuse-making Europeans are really going to spit out their Gauloises, set their berets at a jaunty angle, roll up the sleeves of their striped shirts, wade in and crush Osama bin Laden for us -- because they're not.

The real question is whether we can take seriously a presidential candidate who -- based on third-hand rumors reported back by his fellow travelers -- appears to actually believe they will.