USA TODAY EDITORS SLAM KERRY ON IRAQ
Now we know why USA Today featured an op-ed by Kerry today. The editors ripped the Democratic candidate for not enough specifics in his Iraq plans.
With the election just three months away, Kerry has done little to separate his views from those of President Bush....
Challengers prefer to camp out in the chorus of critics and offer generalized solutions. Thirty-six years ago, Republican candidate Richard Nixon made a similar pitch for ending the Vietnam War: He slammed the Democrats as incompetent, called on allies to bear more of the burden and suggested that he had a plan to end the war that he couldn't disclose until he was in office.
Four years later, he still had no answer.
Iraq isn't Vietnam, and Kerry's plan isn't quite as opaque as Nixon's, but the historical echoes are strong enough to suggest that if Kerry has a credible proposal for Iraq, he needs to fill in the blanks.
The headline? "Missing in action: Kerry's complete strategy for Iraq." Ouch.
Note: This is the second time in the campaign that the normal left-leaning USA Today has something negative to say about the Democrat candidate. What is going on at USA Today?
SWIFT BOAT VETS LETTER TO TV STATIONS
The Swift Boat Vets have a counter-letter to television stations.
The more one hears from these guys, the more one wants a comprehensive, detailed, point-by-point rebuttal from the Kerry folks, not this "they're all crazy right wingers" defense. If the Swifties are lying, then it ought to be easy to prove. Instead, they're the ones who are citing eyewitness testimony, affidavits, records, the Globe biography of Kerry, etc.
I agree with this. Let's get all the information available and forget about the Kerry campaign "brown books" and find out what is real, imagined, and just a bunch of hooey.
BUSH'S SO-CALLED GAFFE
Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, etc. have all had fun with another Bushism, his recent comment "a gem of a Freudian slip," as the Times said. The President said: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Ha ha ha ha ha. Get it? Bush admitted he and his administration "never stop thinking about new ways to harm the country"!
Am I so humor-challenged to hear that and think, 'well, the government has to think about new ways to harm our country in order to prevent them'? Wasn't part of the problem on September 11 was that not enough people in the government were thinking about new ways to harm the country? Don't we wish some official had asked, "so what do we do if somebody hijacks a plane and tries to crash it into a building?"
Maybe I just don't get this sophisticated New York Times humor.
NO TROOP AID FOR PRESIDENT KERRY?
The Los Angeles Times has a devastating story that the Bush people ought to be spotlighting. In short, Kerry has staked his Iraq policy on the idea that he can convince allies to contribute more troops to stabilize Iraq. Lawmakers in Europe are saying that they’re not likely to contribute much, no matter how much they love President Kerry.
Kerry's proposals depend on changing the minds of foreign leaders who do not want to defy their electorates by sending forces into what many consider to be a U.S.-made mess.
"I understand why John Kerry is making proposals of this kind, but there is a lack of realism in them," Menzies Campbell, a British lawmaker who is a spokesman on defense issues for the Liberal Democratic Party, said in a typical comment.
Many allied countries may welcome a new team in Washington after years of friction with the Bush administration. But foreign leaders are making it clear they don't want to add enough of their own troops to allow U.S. forces to scale back to a minority share in Iraq, as Kerry has proposed.
Allies say they are ready to consider further financial aid and other help for the fragile new Iraqi government. But some officials overseas already are fretting about Kerry's talk of burden-shifting.
"Some Europeans are rather concerned that Mr. Kerry might have expectations for relief [from abroad] that are going to be hard to meet," said one senior European diplomat in a statement echoed in several capitals.
some key countries have already ruled out providing troops, and others are badly strained from the deployments they have already made.
The French and German governments have made clear that sending troops is out of the question. British officials have made no such categorical statement, but they have expressed concern that their troops are overstretched.
Although Japan has supplied a 550-member noncombat force as a symbol of its international commitment, analysts there see little chance the nation would agree to send more.
Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrei Denisov, ruled out a commitment of troops. "We are not going to send anybody there, and that's all there is to say," Denisov said.
"From the major European countries, there's simply not a lot of available troops out there, for both practical and political reasons," said Christopher Makins, president of the Atlantic Council of the United States, which supports U.S. engagement abroad.
Many allied countries have a limited number of troops suitable for the Iraq mission, and most of those are already deployed on other missions, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Africa, Makins said.
Dana Allin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London said, "I think there's no question, in general, you'll find it easier to get cooperation from allies if there is a new [U.S.] administration." But Allin added that if new troops were to be sent to Iraq "it's unclear where they would come from."
Kerry has at times said he would particularly like to bring in troops from Arab countries. But diplomats, including those from Arab nations, say they consider the scenario unlikely. The Iraqi interim government has for months excluded the possibility of any peacekeeping troops coming from immediate neighbors, in part because the Iraqi people would be suspicious of neighbors' intentions.
The recent collapse of a Saudi proposal to bring in peacekeeping troops from other Arab and Muslim countries also indicates the long odds against the idea.
Senior Iraqi officials told U.S. officials this summer that they opposed the idea of bringing in additional troops from any foreign country.
Campbell, the British lawmaker, added that Kerry "has to overcome the very considerable barrier of the fact that he himself voted for military action in support of President Bush."
One wonders what the nation’s foreign-policy elite and the multilateralists will say if American people elect John Kerry on the basis of this pie-in-the-sky, wishful-thinking approach to Iraq that ends up going nowhere.
UPDATE: This afternoon, the Bush campaign distributed an email calling attention to this article.
PENNSYLVANIA LOOKING BETTER FOR BUSH?
While at the Democratic convention, I had heard from a knowledgeable Republican that Pennsylvania wasn't looking good for President Bush. That seemed plausible, since Bush did worse than expected in that state in 2000.
But maybe that assessment was premature. Now a Rasmussen Report poll reveals 46 per cent of respondents would vote for Democratic nominee John Kerry, while 45 per cent would support Republican incumbent John Kerry. Five per cent of respondents would vote for another candidate, and four per cent are undecided.
Last month Kerry was up 48 to 43. Of course, this could just be a statistical blip. But the Keystone state is worth keeping an eye on - and if Bush were to win that state's 23 electoral votes, that would make Kerry's job exponentially harder.
UPDATE: Kerry Spot reader Matt points out that this poll's release is between Democrat Kerry and Republican Kerry. There's a flip-flop joke in there somewhere. One presumes that this release has a typo, and the Republican incumbent is Bush. Or maybe Kerry got 91 percent of the vote in a race against himself.
There's always more good stuff on The Kerry Spot on National Review Online
No comments:
Post a Comment