Responsibility Error
by Andrew Sullivan
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.09.03
The implosion of John Kerry's candidacy for president has now become one of the minor themes of the current race for the White House. Pundits have aired all sorts of theories about Kerry's failure to gain traction in any of the major primary states--and his spectacular decline in New Hampshire and even Massachusetts. But there is no real mystery to Kerry's failure. He has said very little that either appeals to Democratic primary voters or to the country as a whole. His rhetoric is vacuous; his prescriptions weak; his self-regard over-powering. A decent example of how his own words have undone him can be seen in his latest interview with Rolling Stone. Kerry has been criticized for using the f-word in the interview. But the real issue is what else he said.
When asked whether he regretted his vote to give the president authority to wage war against Iraq if necessary, Kerry replied:
What I regret most of all is the way the administration dealt with it--the extraordinary failure of the administration to keep its promises, to be mature and thoughtful about how you take a nation to war. They misled us; they presented false intelligence to us. The president made a series of promises to us--number one, that he was gonna make every effort possible to build a legitimate coalition. He did not--he built a fraudulent coalition. Second, he was gonna exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and the inspection process. He did not. And third, that he would go to war as a last resort. He did not.
I voted to protect the security of our country, based on the notion that the only way to get inspectors back in was to have a legitimate threat of force and the potential of using it. They took that legitimacy and bastardized it. If I were president, we would not be in Iraq today--we would not be at war. This president abused the process.
None of this makes sense. Everyone knew last year that the president was considering war against Saddam Hussein. No one who voted in the Senate or House could have been under any illusions about what their vote could ultimately mean. For Kerry to reinterpret his vote last fall as simply a vote for diplomatic pressure on Iraq may be a good way to finesse the issue on the stump. But anyone with a decent memory will recall exactly why the vote was necessary and what its meaning was. If you give someone a blank check, as Kerry and so many others did, you can't then complain when he writes in the amount he wants. Especially when that amount was very clearly telegraphed ahead of time. If Kerry had doubts about Bush's ability to follow through, he should have voted against the war resolution. And the fact that, even now, he cannot take responsibility for his easy legislative position does not bode well for his ability to take similar responsibility when in the executive branch.
And what can Kerry mean by the phrase "mature and thoughtful" as his preferred method of building a case for war? The president gave several speeches, delineating a very radical but equally candid case for a new foreign policy after 9/11. He unveiled the doctrine of preemption in painstaking detail. He made a strong and nuanced case at the United Nations about the enforcement of various U.N. resolutions. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a long and detailed briefing to the Security Council about Saddam's infringements of U.N. resolutions; and the preliminary report by David Kay showed beyond any doubt that Saddam was indeed in violation. It is difficult to know how this process--which lasted around six months from U.N. speech to declaration of war--can be described as thoughtless or immature. You might disagree with it. You might make genuine and pointed criticisms of the intelligence used by the administration. But the notion that Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Blair were somehow not thoughtful or mature is simply condescension, not argument. But substituting condescension for argument has become almost a leitmotif of Kerry's campaign.
Then there is this notion of a "legitimate coalition" and a "fraudulent coalition." What is the exact criterion that distinguishes between the two? The coalition assembled by the Bush administration included the biggest military ally of the United States., Great Britain, as well as Japan, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, and many other countries. That's four of the top seven economies in the world. Why is such a coalition "fraudulent"? Is it because only Britain provided real military assistance? The sad truth is that only Britain retains the kind of technological expertise that allows for active military cooperation with the United States. Is a coalition only legitimate if it is endorsed by the U.N. Security Council twice? Or only legitimate if it wins the support of France or Germany or Russia? If Kerry means that every coalition that fails the U.N. unanimity test is fraudulent, then the United States truly will become a unilateral power in the future. We will have no choice.
Kerry then claims that the president had not exhausted the inspections process. But that process had been going on for twelve years. And it was the Clinton administration that switched formal U.S. policy in Iraq to regime change, long before George W. Bush even won the Republican nomination for president. Kerry then says he would never have launched a war under those circumstances. What could this actually have meant at the time? Would he have allowed Saddam to defy the inspections process, while scaling back the military build-up that had forced Saddam to make even the slightest concessions? Or would he have kept the entire military machine there indefinitely while Hans Blix continued his futile searches? How long would he have waited? Kerry's memory about the actual options facing any president last January, February, and March is as hazy as his memory of the war-vote in the Congress.
But on to Kerry's final thoughts about foreign policy:
This is a critical time for the country. The stakes are just enormous. We need a president, frankly, who has the kind of experience that I've had: of being in a war, understanding its downsides but understanding the nature of the threats in the world. Understanding that you couldn't leave Saddam Hussein to his own devices, but you needed to do this in a very responsible, thoughtful way.
I'm gonna lift this country up to a greater engagement in the world. I mean, think of what we could do to reach out and begin to present a different face of our country. Think of what we could do to advance the interests of the developing world, so people would see the United States as not just this aggressive, arrogant force that only thinks of itself and doesn't really have a greater sense of humanity and concern. We're just not embracing any of that stuff today, and it drives me crazy.
There's that vacuous advocacy of "thoughtfulness" again. But when you glean the actual argument Kerry is making, it falls apart. He argues that he favors "a greater engagement" in the world. Yet the current president has just committed the United States to a decades-long war against terror and in favor of democracy in the arid soil of the Middle East. He has put troops--covert and not-so-covert--in dozens of countries all around the globe. The notion that this enormous effort in Iraq and elsewhere--the biggest deployment of economic and military resources in recent history--is not a sign of a "greater engagement" is delusional. Instead of embracing or even criticizing Bush's new internationalism, Kerry simply ignores it, pretends it isn't there, or conjures up a presidency that simply isn't reflected in reality.
As for humanitarianism, he argues that "we're just not embracing any of that stuff today." Yet this administration has devoted more resources to combating HIV in Africa than the previous administration ever dreamed of. How is that effort--far, far larger than that of any other country--purely a reflection of America as "an aggressive, arrogant force"? And how are the billions for schools, reconstruction, public health, roads, and other projects in Iraq and Afghanistan not a function of a shared "humanity and concern"? Perhaps these projects are misplaced; perhaps they aren't followed through; perhaps the security situation hasn't enabled these enterprises to flourish or deepen. But the idea that none "of that stuff" is happening is pure nonsense.
What you have in this interview is not a man thinking through the problems facing the country, examining the policies of the current administration, and telling us where they are wrong. What you have is someone intent on merely inventing a chronology that didn't happen and a reality that doesn't exist in order to posit himself as the cure for all our ills. Peer through the "maturity" and "thoughtfulness" and you find very little of substance and a great deal of empty narcissism. That's why Senator John Kerry is losing. And it's why, of all the Democratic candidates, he deserves to.http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=fisking&s=sullivan120903 |
