Actually, it is clear from the exit polls that many that voted for Kerry in the primaries do not like him. The outcome is unknown... it is not as you suggest.
Flip-flop on Iraq
John Kerry is very close to grabbing the Democratic presidential nomination, but he won't have much time to rest. His record, electoral math and the endless quest for buzz are all on the table.
By Robin Shepherd, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,D.C. and a former Moscow bureau chief for the Times of London
Published February 15, 2004
"Bring it on"?
This is John Kerry's setup line on the question of national security and President Bush. If he wants to debate the subject, Kerry shouts, "Bring it on."
Right subject. Wrong candidate.
That just about sums it up for me every time John Kerry uses one of his victory speeches to challenge the Republicans to make defense and security a central theme in this year's presidential election campaign.
In Roanoke, Va., last week, he certainly put his finger on what is at stake: "You have the privilege of having an impact on the lives of people all over this planet," he grandly told the party faithful. "Because you are choosing a leader of the free world."
I could not agree more.
But as one of those people from "all over this planet" yet not from the United States, I think (once you get past the tough-guy rhetoric) that Kerry is poorly qualified to give the American people and the wider world the debate on this subject that we so desperately need.
Consider the context.
For right or wrong, the current administration has inaugurated a truly seismic shift in U.S. foreign policy priorities, possibly the most significant since George Kennan outlined his groundbreaking theory of containment for the Soviet Union in a 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs. The Bush doctrine of pre-emption challenges the entire post-World War II international system, and it has brought the United States into conflict with some of its staunchest traditional allies.
For Kerry, this departure in U.S. foreign policymaking is the "most arrogant, reckless, inept and ideological . . . in the modern history of our country," as he put it after the Feb. 3 primaries.
Yet it was precisely the Bush doctrine of pre-emption to which Kerry gave his support in authorizing war against Iraq in the first place. Kerry now says that he favored more time for diplomacy, that he was basing his support on faulty information provided by the president, and that he was always concerned about alienating traditional allies.
All of this may be true, but the October 2002 resolution that authorized the president to go to war is about as open-ended an endorsement of pre-emption as one could imagine. It specifically authorized the president to act "as he determines to be necessary" to defend national security and enforce UN resolutions. If the United States is now isolated in the world, it is for reasons that Kerry himself has explicitly endorsed.
Kerry supporters have been quick to seize upon former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay's recent assertion that Iraq probably did not possess large quantities of weapons of mass destruction. Kerry, they say, was misled.
At this point, common humanity can only lead one to hope, for Kerry's sake, that substantial stocks of weapons of mass destruction are not now found in Iraq. If U.S. forces suddenly announce that they've found enough ricin and dioxin to fill Lake Michigan, where will Kerry stand then?
Will he suddenly retract his retraction and tell us that he now supports the war again?
This, however, is merely one instance of a broader problem Kerry has had in getting it right on Iraq.
If he appears implausible on the current Iraq war, he appears positively ridiculous on the first one, which he opposed outright. Explaining his stance to NBC's Tom Brokaw the night of his victory in the New Hampshire primary, he meekly ventured in his defense: "I thought the country needed to sort of come together a little more" before taking on that battle.
Actually, what the country and the world needed was what then-President George H.W. Bush provided--leadership. By the time the country had "sort of come together a little more," Saddam Hussein's tanks may well have been streaming across the Jordanian desert to do battle with Israel. Pick your own Armageddon scenario, but that's not bad for starters.
The only thing clear about Kerry's thinking on foreign policy is that it is one gigantic mess. Two stars for bravery and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam may be impressive, but they don't substitute for clear thinking on grand strategy in the post-Sept. 11 world.
This will matter when Democratic strategists decide which issues to flag for debate and which to play down in what now appears certain to be Kerry's upcoming campaign against Bush.
If Kerry fights this election on foreign policy, those strategists are likely to conclude, the Republicans will simply crucify him. His judgment on the 1991 gulf war was disastrous. His reasoning on the second gulf war was contradictory. It would be safer to play to his strengths than advertise a policy area where he looks weak.
For those of us hoping to see a real debate about foreign policy in America this year, it gets all the more depressing when we consider one possible response from the Republicans to a Kerry nomination. This time put yourself in the shoes of a Republican strategist.
While Bush obviously will emphasize his credentials as a leader who can be trusted on national security, it is unlikely that his own strategists will push him to get bogged down in a really substantive debate either.
It now seems clear, after all, that the ostensible reason for going to war in Iraq was indeed false. The weapons of mass destruction may not exist.
We in the outside world are left then with the worrying prospect of a conspiracy of silence in which both parties to a Kerry-Bush faceoff would appear to have powerful incentives to slowly but surely downplay the whole foreign policy agenda. We will get sloganizing, to be sure. But real debate could easily become submerged.
Of course, a lot can happen between now and November. And if the American media does its job properly, it is still possible that foreign policy will remain at the top of the agenda.
But if things do unfold according to the scenario outlined above, I can't help feeling that the Democrats will have let themselves and the rest of us down.
In Howard Dean there was, of course, one candidate who really could have fought a credible, high-profile battle with the president on foreign policy. And the vast majority among the Democrats supported his consistent opposition to the war with relish.
For purely populist reasons though--electability (i.e. we'll vote for him because others will) being cited by pollsters as the main reason among primary and caucus voters for supporting Kerry--Dean, it seems, has been dumped.
From one point of view, that may be understandable. It would be naive to expect a party to back a candidate whom they believe would actually lose them the election. But it hardly lends credence to Democrats' claims that they, in contrast to the Republicans, are a party of principle.
All I can hope is that I've missed something here.
America owes itself and the world a truly penetrating, aggressive and substantive discussion of U.S. foreign policy this year. I just get the feeling we're not going to get one.
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