John (''Benedict'') Kerry
by John Armor
Monday, February 09, 2004
We begin with what this column does not charge. I do not question John Kerry's patriotism. I do strongly question both his intelligence and his ethics. There are many aspects of John Kerry's career which should be reviewed during his campaign for President. I've previously covered my personal knowledge of him. Here, I’ll skip all other questions except his capacities as a military officer then, and his capacity to be the commander in chief today.
To understand the two sides of this modern citizen-soldier, it’s worthwhile to reexamine the two sides of the career of General Benedict Arnold.
The Battle of Saratoga was not a single battle at a single place, but a series of engagements at different places over several days. Major General Benedict Arnold played a critical role in two of those. In the first, he led 1,000 militia who stopped the advance of General Burgoyne's second column along the Mohawk River. He returned by October 7, 1777, to the Hudson River site of the main battle against General Burgoyne. Arnold led the assault against the redoubt held by German soldiers, broke the British lines, and was seriously wounded in the leg.
Burgoyne retreated. Days later, surrounded, outnumbered, and cut off from supplies or reinforcement, Burgoyne surrendered. This was a critical battle that saved the American Revolution. Had Burgoyne succeeded in driving south to New York City (held by the British), he would have split both the state and the nation, trapping the American armies in New England. As the website www.americanrevolution.com correctly says, ''Had he died there [of his wound], posterity would have known few names brighter than that of Benedict Arnold.''
At the Saratoga National Historic Park there’s a monument that displays only a boot. It is a memorial to the bravery and skill of Arnold in that battle, and of the injuries he suffered in his final, successful assault against the center of the British lines.
Two years later, General Arnold married a woman who was a British sympathizer, and he was placed in command of Philadelphia, where he came in contact with some wealthy families who favored the British. He'd had many quarrels with subordinates and superiors and he'd developed a taste for luxuries he could not afford. He was slated to take command of the garrison at West Point on the Hudson. He contacted the British about betraying that garrison in return for a substantial cash payment and rank and pay in the British military. His British contact was Major John Andre.
Andre went behind American lines in civilian clothes to complete the negotiations with Arnold. On his return toward British lines, Andre was captured by two American soldiers who questioned and searched him. They found documents outlining Arnold's planned treachery. Andre was tried by a military tribunal before General Washington. (This was the first American instance of such trials under the Law of War. Similar trials have been conducted in most American wars, and the latest of these are about to take place in Guantanamo, Cuba.) Andre was convicted, and sentenced to hang. Washington offered to free Andre in exchange for Arnold, who had fled to British lines. The British refused that offer. Andre was hanged. Benedict Arnold escaped to Britain, and his name entered the English language as a synonym for ''traitor.''
Had Arnold succeeded in betraying the garrison at West Point, the Hudson River would have been opened for a British attack from the south. That might have accomplished the same destruction of the American cause as Burgoyne's attack from the north had threatened two years before.
Although most Americans today know that Arnold was a traitor, his attempted betrayal took nothing away from his real achievements in the Battle of Saratoga, that saved the Revolution from defeat.
We turn now to the military changes of heart of Lt. John Kerry between his service in Vietnam and his later actions as a civilian. His later actions do not meet the constitutional definition of treason, and I make no suggestion to the contrary. They DO raise serious questions about his intelligence and integrity.
On 23 April, 1971, John Kerry testified under oath before Congress that Americans in Vietnam had ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.” Before his testimony was over, he said, ''We all did it.'' When he testified, he was wearing his medals which he later claimed to have thrown over a fence in protest. The story of the medals has changed several times over the years. Suffice to say, those medals now grace the walls of his Senate offices, and also grace the rhetoric of his campaign speeches as he runs for president.
While Kerry confessed to no war crimes personally, his testimony was based on a meeting in Detroit where a number of men who claimed they were veterans (though some were not; and some who were, were not in service where and when they claimed). Both the Detroit meeting and the testimony before Congress were events staged by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which John Kerry was a national leader.
Any such actions by members of the American military are crimes that should be prosecuted. Witness the trial of Lt. Calley over the My Lai massacre. It is a separate offense under the U.S. Military Code for officers or soldiers who have knowledge of any such actions, not to report them to theircommanding officers. None of the crimes which John Kerry ascribed to ''all'' of his fellow members of the U.S. military were ever reported to commanding officers, or resulted in trials of anyone involved.
Most recently in his ''victory'' statement in the State of Washington, after winning five of seven Democrat primaries last week, Kerry began by mentioning his service in Vietnam. He went on to thank veterans for supporting him, and to encourage veterans to be part of his campaigns in the remaining states, and presumably in the general election in November. It’s beyond me how any American veteran who served honorably, especially those who served in Vietnam, can support Kerry after his statements under oath that ''all'' who served there committed acts that are war crimes.
But this column is not written solely for veterans, and especially those from Vietnam. And it is not concerned solely with events that happened more than thirty years ago. The world is a perilous place today, especially for Americans. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that peril has existed for more than a decade. The attacks on 11 September, 2001, did not change the nature of that peril. It only forced all Americans to recognize it, in no uncertain terms, with a blood price paid by civilians and police and firefighters. So a critical question in the presidential election of 2004 is which of the two candidates (who are almost certainly George Bush and John Kerry) are better equipped to command the diplomatic and military capacities of America in dealing with that peril, which takes many forms and exists in as many as fifty nations around the world, as well as at home.
John Kerry voted for both of the declarations of war which Congress passed as required by the Constitution, and which President Bush used in committing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Yes, there were two declarations concerning Iraq, in 2001 and 2002. More than two years ago, I wrote an article for United Press International which pointed out that the authorization of ''military force'' contained in the original Patriot Act, days after 11 September, used almost the same language that Congress adopted two centuries ago to authorize President Jefferson to deal with the Barbary Pirates.)
If John Kerry were as educated and logical as he claims to be, he would have recognized that his two votes for declarations of war were exactly what they said they were. He would therefore recognize that he voted to approve war, and would not utter in public the obviously false statement that he ''voted for the resolutions,'' but he did not intend ''to authorize war.''
But Kerry's current inadequacies are deeper and more dangerous than that. He claims that the current military actions are ''unilateral'' whereas they are obviously ''multinational.'' In using the latter mantra, he actually means--as he sometimes says--that we should not go to war without the approval of the United Nations. The history of the United Nations in using military force to solve deadly international problems is perfect. The U.N. has failed in every such instance, with the only question being how many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people will pay with their lives for the latest failure of the U.N.
One of the earliest and most massive failures of the U.N. now haunts the world in a more serious way, fifty years after the initial failure. That is the bloodthirsty regime in North Korea, which now has nuclear weapons and can be expected at some time to export those weapons and the missiles to carry them, just as North Korea has exported every prior weapons system it has developed, to whomever would pay the cash price for them.
I've written before about the U.N., so I’ll be very brief now. Between ambassadors who represent nations that are dictatorships (nearly an absolute majority in the General Assembly) and those whose international ethics are governed by the ability to make money from dealing with dictatorships, a majority of the Assembly voters and several of the veto votes on the Security Council are held by nations which will never vote for decisive action against dictatorships. The eloquent and ineffective appeal of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia to the League of Nations when Italy invaded his country, could easily be repeated by leaders of every nation or people who are being slaughtered by others, on the watch of the U.N. And such modern appeals would be equally fruitless.
And yet it is this unbroken history of failure to which Kerry, as president, would yoke the diplomatic and military abilities of the United States to defend its own citizens. Again, a man who was acting with a knowledge of history--and honesty in understanding the import of past failures--would never suggest that the president of the United States should deliberately disable his most basic duty: to defend the citizens of the United States, subject to the Constitution which requires Congress to speak first by majority decision. Nothing in either the Constitution, nor in the charter of the United Nations, requires a president of the United States to seek the approval of any other body than Congress, in defending the lives of Americans from attack.
I debated John Kerry at Yale, back when he was a sophomore and I was a senior. His thinking and debating characteristics haven’t changed in the intervening years. When he has reached a conclusion, he doesn’t allow either facts or logic to influence him at all. And anyone who says today that we should leave the fate of America in the hands of the U.N. in general, or France and Germany in particular, lacks both the knowledge and the integrity to serve as commander in chief of the American military.
On this all-important question, John Kerry showed his colors early in the Vietnam matters described above. He has also shown his colors late, in his recent statements that he didn't mean it when he voted for the Iraq war, and his insistence on his own particular brand of ''multilateral'' use of military force. His definition of ''multinational'' actually means giving enemies of American interests a veto over decisions that belong properly and solely to the President and the Congress.
As I said at the beginning, I do not question John Kerry's patriotism. But many times in many ways, presidents have led the nation into disasters, not because they were intent on harming the nation (in short, being traitors), but because they lacked either the understanding or integrity to do what the current crisis called for. Foolishness, rather than malice, explains most bad decisions whether personal or national. The reason is simple: malice is rare, but fools are commonplace.
Can someone who graduated from Yale be a ''fool''? In the objective sense of being too dumb to understand complex issues, the answer is a resounding no. There was a time in the dim mists of history when the admissions policy of Yale could be described with only slight exaggeration thus: ''If the body's warm and the check is good, he's in.'' But that didn’t apply when I got there. And I got there before John Kerry and George Bush. (And before Bill and Hillary Clinton, for that matter.) No, Yale hasn’t graduated any objective fools in the last century or so. But it does both graduate, and retain on its faculty, individuals who are situational fools.
These are people who blind themselves by ideology, or by occasionally by lust for wealth or power, to the lessons of history. John Kerry is one of those. He is deliberately ignorant of the history of the U.S., the history of other nations, the history of warfare, and especially the history of the U.N. and before that of the League of Nations. He is a situational fool, and as such he should never get near the White House without a visitor's pass.
Would Kerry’s honorable service in Vietnam qualify him for the job of president? In part. But his career since then demonstrates the contrary on the issue of the safety of American citizens in a perilous world. Whatever Kerry's qualities as a peacetime leader (I have not addressed those), he has disqualified himself as a wartime leader. He is ''unfit'' for the promotion he seeks. And American soldiers and civilians will die in much greater numbers than before, if he talks his way into that promotion.
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