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Kerry on Iraq
The candidate betrays his pre-9/11 mentality.
Sunday, August 15, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Debate has been raging over John Kerry's Vietnam service, not least on our pages. John O'Neill, co-author of the best-selling "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," first wrote here in May, while Kerry supporter and Vietnam vet Jim Rassmann told his story in an op-ed on Tuesday.
We'll try to sort this history out another day, because this week we think the bigger news is what Mr. Kerry has been saying about the future of Iraq. For a while it looked as if the Senator wanted to avoid any debate on that subject by hewing close to President Bush's policy. But under questioning from the press and prodding from the White House, he is beginning to open up, and the results are disquieting. The more he talks about it, the more the dovish, "come home, America" instincts of his long Senate voting record are emerging.
On Monday, for example, Mr. Kerry finally gave an answer to the question he had been ducking for weeks: He acknowledged he would still have voted for the October 2002 Iraq war resolution even if he had known we wouldn't find WMD -- but only as a way to give the President more clout to negotiate. In other words, he would have wanted the authority to go to war but without any intention of actually fighting it. How this admission will make the Kim Jong Ils and Ayatollahs of the world more pliable is hard to fathom.
Even more disturbing, Mr. Kerry is now talking openly about bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq. He offered the hint of such a plan during his Boston speech, but now he's putting a timetable on it, saying he'd begin the drawdown within six months of his inauguration. "I believe that within a year from now, we could significantly reduce American forces in Iraq, and that's my plan," he said this week. This followed his comments last week that "we're going to get our troops home where they belong."
Mr. Kerry says he would do this by replacing U.S. troops with foreign ones. But what if that doesn't happen, regardless of how well he speaks French? The message that will be heard in Baghdad is that Mr. Kerry is planning a date-certain U.S. retreat. Such a pledge only emboldens the Baathist insurgents to fight on, rather than accept Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's offer of amnesty. And it encourages the terrorists to believe that their strategy of car-bombing has worked to weaken U.S. resolve after all.
Even more destructive is the effect Mr. Kerry's promise could have on ordinary Iraqis. It signals to those who are risking their lives by fighting the insurgents that the U.S. might not stay until stability is restored. It also subverts his promise to secure more international help. What country would want to sign on to Iraq if the U.S. is headed for the exits?
