Kerry's New Iraq Plan

John Kerry has decided to make the final six weeks of this campaign all about Iraq. Given the many previous positions Kerry has taken on the war, this seems to be a bad political strategy. Clearly, every time Kerry says something about what should be done or what he would do, he will be hit with his own words advocating the exact opposite. In today's speech at NYU Kerry offered four things that he would do in Iraq:
-Get more help from other nations.
-Provide better training for Iraqi security forces.
-Provide benefits to the Iraqi people.
-Ensure that democratic elections can be held next year as promised.
Of these four "new" directions, three (the last three) are already in place. The fourth, his idea of getting more help from other nations, is simply a pipe dream. Does anyone still think that if Kerry is elected France and Germany will rush troops to Iraq? That proposition is simply inane. So what does Kerry really propose?

It is now clear (if that is possible with Kerry) that a President Kerry - or a President Gore, for that matter - would not have invaded Iraq. This, of course, is completely opposite to his statement that even knowing what we know today he would have made the same choice as President Bush. More important than Kerry's mutable position, is his display of a total lack of understanding of what this war is about and why we need to fight it. If Kerry still thinks that Iraq was invaded because of WMD or their connection to 9/11 then he is either deluded or lying. There are no other alternatives. Judging by Kerry's past record on defense and the Cold War, one must assume that he is not lying, that he is simply a deluded dove whose policies will endanger the US and the world in the same way that Clinton's did.

It is impossible to divorce the war in Iraq from the war on terror. They are both battles in in our war against the ideology of Islamofascism, be it religious or secular. To defeat it we need to show the Islamic world that their ideas are wrong. The Islamic world understands force, properly applied. My main criticism of the Bush Administration handling of Iraq is that they have not been forceful enough, and this has multiplied the problems; Fallujah should have been reduced to rubble after the lynching of US contractors there; al-Sadr should have been killed and his army destroyed, not released with their weapons. Either of those moves would have done a lot to end the insurgency. Kerry's statements about "bringing troops home" have the opposite effect - it shows the insurgents that they are winning, and that all they have to do is wait. With each public foreign policy pronouncement Kerry and his advisers demonstrate just how dangerous a Kerry presidency would be.