It's getting good. Drudge says an intern story is ready to break that Kerry foes predict "will ruin Kerry."
I've learned to give Drudge stories a day or two to shake out, but must admit the new level of scrutiny on the junior Senator from Massachusetts is fun. Jeff Jacoby has blasted him today:,
Equivocating politicians are sometimes accused of trying to be "all things to all people," but few have taken the practice of expedience and shifty opportunism to Kerry's level. Massachusetts residents have known this about their junior senator for a long time. Now the rest of the country is going to find out.
And Mark Steyn explains to our British cousins that Senator Kerry's real gift is his ability to look big in a fight:
The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself. And few men can claim as large a role in the loss of national will that led to that defeat as John Kerry. A brave man in Vietnam, he returned home to appear before Congress and not merely denounce the war but damn his "band of brothers" as a gang of rapists, torturers and murderers led by officers happy to license them to commit war crimes with impunity. He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne.Posted by jk at February 12, 2004 01:15 PM
Hmmm, I think another lesson from Vietnam is that we cannot militarily defeat fanatics. If there is a system to continually train new fighters you will never kill or imprison them fast enough to win. I think about this whenever I hear Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush talk about how we will outlast the insurgents.
Posted by: Silence Dogood at February 16, 2004 02:11 PMI hear your theme, Silence, but cannot agree.
North Vietnam was refortified and supplied by Russia and China, with which it shared a common border. The Sunni Triangle is an isolated area that is militarily quarantined. We can outlast the insurgents there.
Perhaps there will always be terrorists. I am not as pessimistic as you but concede that on some level you might be right. We can, however, stop the state sponsors of terrorism. We are well on the way already having removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Neighboring states are suddenly becoming a little more cooperative.
Then again, I think we should have stuck around in Viet Nam.
Posted by: jk at February 16, 2004 02:44 PMValid point about the military quarantine JK, but what about after the US military leaves? It seems to me that we are fighting not against a group of people, but against an idealogy. The only way to defeat an idea is with a better idea. We have to convince mainstream Iraqis that a secular democracy is the better idea. Unfortunately there are already signs that a Theocracy may be the choice of the majority. The Iraqi people could take their new freedom and choose an Islamic based form of government, which could be much better for the Iraqi people then life under Saddam, but could end up making Iraq more of a supporter of terrorism than before. Saddam deserves the worst of fates for sure, but as a secularist he was not a big friend of Islamic radicals. This is not to say that an Islamic democracy would naturally support terrorists, obviously not, but giving people freedom is a leap of faith, there are no guarantees that the new government will be a friendly one 5 or 10 years down the road.
Posted by: Silence Dogood at February 18, 2004 10:51 AMSomebody said "if we do our job right, we will create a nation that will hate us in ten years."
I cannot predict how things will turn out in Iraq. I remain convinced that they are better off and that a new government, if not explicitly pro-Western, would still be better for the West and the Mideast.
You invoke Vietnam (fairly, although I think the comparison strained) -- how about the Barbary Pirates? That battle was long and ideological and against amorphous targets, yet the US prevailed.
Posted by: jk at February 18, 2004 12:16 PMI've said before that Iraq will be on it's way to freedom when they start building WalMarts. Materialism is a powerful force for freedom and capitalism. Just ask the WTO protesters in THIS country.
Posted by: johngalt at February 20, 2004 11:37 PM