Who Won? Does It Matter?

[Annie]

Kerry won on style and Bush on substance. Truth is, the debates only matter to those who haven't been paying attention, thus Kerry won. I'd planned on posting on a letter, but don't feel like doing that now. Bottom line, Kerry came away with looking Presidential. I wonder if the 'no decision' at this point, noticed that while he spoke of 'a plan' and gave his website, lol, he never specified what it was? At the same time, if anyone bothers to go to www.johnkerry.com and read their 'plan' there is nothing there, there?

for more:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041011&s=peretz101104

October 1, 2004
NO ONE COMES CLEAN ON IRAQ.
Evil Lesser
by Martin Peretz


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Post date 10.01.04 | Issue date 10.11.04 E-mail this article

friend of mine says the American electorate must choose between "the evil of the two lessers." That's my take, too. I don't mean there aren't some real differences: stem-cell research, for example, and the class distribution of America's tax burden. Maybe that's enough for you. Maybe it's enough for me, too--and on those issues, I'm with John Kerry. But, even on the environment, where a great gulf supposedly separates the candidates, Kerry's promises are exuberant but vague, and George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, promoted one of the largest and most productive programs of wind farms in the country. This actually diminishes our dependency on Middle Eastern oil, something Kerry's rhetoric about energy independence does not.

But much of the passion behind people's preferences stems not from issues, but from character. There is this insufferable certainty among some elites that Bush is just not literate and that Kerry is. It is true that Bush does not, as a rule, speak in clear English sentences. But neither, frankly, does Kerry. That's why both of their handlers (and God only knows how many handlers Kerry has) so severely limit their exposure to question-and-answer press scrutiny. Here is a typical Kerry ramble, orotund yet banal, which I saw on The Wall Street Journal's website:

What's your plan, mister president, to get the other countries in there? What's your plan to have 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost being carried by America? I mean, he is the president today, and we have given him advice from day one; from day one, from the floor of the Senate when we debated it, where I said don't--you know, you've got to have other countries with you, don't make an end run around the U.N. The difficulty is not winning the military, it's winning the peace; and he ignored it.

Kerry has staked his entire campaign on whatever his position on Iraq is at the moment. This is not a stable foundation. (If he loses, will the Clintonites say Kerry lost because he didn't take their advice to drop Iraq and focus on jobs and health care?) But Iraq is what fires up Kerry's base voters--many of whom are former devotees of Howard Dean and even Michael Moore (whose vulgar dishonesty, combined with a particular animus toward Israel, makes Bush seem like an acolyte of Sissela Bok's astringent book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life). And, since Kerry is losing the historic Democratic majority among women, is running barely even among young people, and may lose once-solidly Democratic New Jersey, he has no choice but to shore up his core of supporters. Kerry suffers no discomfort in having been a yo-yo on Iraq. After all, he has been one for years. In fact, every vote Kerry has cast on Iraq since 1991, when he opposed the first Gulf war, has mirrored a nano-political calculus. He always has a convoluted explanation for the doubters in his camp about why he did this and not that. And it always manages to persuade those in the electorate who are content merely that Kerry is not Bush.



n Iraq, I am with Bush. Yes, I am repelled by how he and his crowd play fast and loose with the facts, by their elevation of their foreign policy reasoning into some kind of catechism. Still, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is like Russia without Josef Stalin: By no means perfect, but a vast improvement. Mahdi Obeidi, the former head of Iraq's nuclear centrifuge program, recently published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that, were Saddam still in power and had international sanctions expired, as they inevitably would have, Baathist Iraq could easily have plunged back into the atomic game. The world has much to thank the United States for on this count.

The Bushies' big mistake was to take a far-too-hopeful view of Arab politics. They thought moderation and tolerance would be the inevitable legacy of Saddam's fall. But they underestimated the deforming injuries Saddam inflicted on the Iraqi population. And they underestimated the cultural gap between us and them. (In this, they were aided by generations of Arabist diplomats and professors who downplayed cultural difference. Ironically, it is just these types who are now saying this optimistic view is naïve, which it probably is.) The Bush administration underestimated the bloody zealotry of Iraqi factions, both secular and pious. It did not comprehend that Al Jazeera and much of the Arab media would root for the killers. It did not grasp sufficiently that Iraq's neighbors wished the Iraqis ill, that Syria--a brutal Alawite minority regime that has slaughtered thousands of Sunni militants--would give them free passage to do mayhem next door. But, by contrast, Kerry would have done nothing to disempower the Iraqi Baath, and, if by some miracle he had, he would have done nothing to disarm the murderous mobs that have arisen in its wake.

Notwithstanding both the administration's grievous lack of candor and its clumsy postwar planning, the use of force against Iraq was just. What kind of "just war" theory would see in the defeat of Saddam anything but a quintessential good? There wasn't in Iraq even the fantasy of an idealized Viet Cong. And, as for those who execute and behead the wretched and the miserable, who explode bombs and cars so that random poor people seeking work will die, who murder the insufficiently pious and ordinary shop owners and civil servants and happenstance patients in hospitals in the thousands and thousands, why would anyone cast these killers as hapless victims of empire? Indeed, the ruthlessness of the suicide bombers and the mercilessness of the decapitators are reasons, in and of themselves, for the United States to stay and fight. Before the toppling, Iraq was governed by the routine terrorism of a cruel regime. Now, it is under siege by terrorism, plain and simple. We will see whether Lieutenant General David Petraeus--placed in charge of building an Iraqi army that will fight--can overcome this. The gloating hypercritics may yet be astonished. But the very notion that there could be in Iraq, with its history of tyranny over eight decades since Gertrude Bell carved it out of whole cloth, a reasonably free election in 13 or 14 or 15 of the country's 18 provinces is a genuine, even astonishing, accomplishment.



n an editorial in last week's New Republic, we wrote that "to win reelection, Bush is lying" about Iraq. I have no qualms about that assertion. But now Kerry has spoken definitively about Iraq as well, at New York University and elsewhere. His speeches have produced a flurry of hosannas. Tnr put a headline on its cover, echoing a phrase in Kerry's address, that proclaimed there was, "finally, a real debate on iraq." But only Ryan Lizza, in last week's issue, termed Kerry's prescriptions what they really are: "fantastic," used in its correct meaning--that is, extravagantly fanciful, capricious, grotesque. So, if Bush is lying about Iraq, so is Kerry. It's not just that he has exaggerated what has gone wrong in Iraq. His entire speech was premised on the assumption that there were European troops and Muslim troops and United Nations gendarmes who would have gone to war with us against Saddam had Bush only waited another few days, weeks, months in the spring of 2003. That is a lie. And now, he holds out the same false promise. It is true, he admits, that there is a Security Council resolution calling on U.N. members to provide soldiers and trainers and a special brigade to protect the U.N. mission in Iraq. "Three months later," he admits, "not a single country has answered that call." Of course, Bush is to blame. And what should Bush do? He should "convene a summit meeting of the world's major powers" and "insist that they make good on that U.N. resolution."

There is something risible in Kerry's faith in these hopeless transactions brokered by Kofi Annan and in the United Nations itself, which is staging yet another tragic, do-nothing performance on Darfur. He surely knows there is no cavalry of Europeans and Arabs about to ride to Iraq's rescue (especially since he intends to withdraw American troops, hardly a move that will give other nations confidence). He surely knows there are no foreign funders willing to bear the financial burden, either. But, if he admits that, then much of his critique of Bush's Iraq policy collapses, and with it his confidence in the honorable community of nations--the kind of phrase of which liberals are fond. Except that the nations to which it refers are neither honorable nor a community nor, in many cases, even nations. Kerry may want to rely on their goodwill, but I don't.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.

 

[Annie]

Thought this was cute:

http://vodkapundit.com/archives/006810.php

Poemblogging
Posted by Stephen Green · 30 September 2004 ·
Sammy T sends a limerick:

The Lerch with the three purple hearts, once flamed his pants with his farts. "Colin Powell," he said, "claims our mojo is dead. But the burn on my Kerry still smarts." Cute.