QandO

July 31, 2004

Kerry's Vietnam Syndrome and National Defense
Posted by McQ

Amir Tahri does a brilliant fisking of John Kerry's statements on foreign policy and the War on Terror.

Some highlights:

Kerry's speech revealed a man who, though vaguely conscious that the world has changed, prefers to assume that it has not.

"The world tonight is very different from the world of four years ago," Kerry told the convention. "We are a nation at war — a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have known before."

Yet Kerry did not say in what ways the world is different. And when it came to dealing with this different world, he had little to offer but pre-9/11 the solutions.

Nor was the Democratic nominee willing to define the nature of this war and point out why this "enemy" was unlike any that the United States has known.

It is important for the American to understand that they face a war that involves more than a mood. It involves real people, command structures, states that offer safe haven, global networks of finance and propaganda, and fifth columnists of various faiths and ideologies in many countries, including the United States.

Its been my feeling, and that's all I can attribute it too, that the left doesn't really believe we're in a war on terror. Oh sure, they know we've been in a war in Iraq, but when I hear them talk about "the war", that's the war they're referring too. I'm just not convinced the left takes the War on Terror seriously, which is one reason you hear all this vague rhetoric.

Why? Well Tahri makes a very important point to explain that:

At the same time, however, this is a new type of war because it is not about territory, control of natural resources, access to markets, and/or other classical causes of trans-national conflict. This is an asymmetrical war in which old tactics of low-intensity conflict have been redefined to allow the use of modern technologies.

This is a different concept of war. It is why you'll find many out there claiming it can't be a war because it doesn't include any of those things and war, by definition consists of "state-to-state" hostilities. Don't believe them. My dictionary also defines "war" as "hostility or contention between people, groups, etc." Make no mistake about it, we're in a war, a war which might include hostilites between states, but just as likely will mean war between a state and a culture which is trans-national.

The question is how do we fight such a war. Well not with the tactics of the last war that's for sure. And as Tahir points out, that's precisely where John Kerry is headed.

How would a President Kerry fight this war?

His answer is simple: "As president, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in [the Vietnam] war," the senator told the convention.

This is precisely the problem.

The lessons of Vietnam could be misleading in fighting the war against terrorism. In Vietnam, the war was over territory: The Communists who had seized control of North Vietnam wanted to annex the south. The United States had intervened to prevent that and enable the South Vietnamese to choose a different future.

That war was fought in Indochina, thousands of miles away from America. The Vietcong would not send death-squads to kill Americans in New York and Washington. Nor did it dream of conquering the world for its ideology, whatever it might have been, or to force all humanity to adopt its beliefs. And the Vietcong enjoyed significant levels of support and sympathy inside the United States, which is presumably not the case in the current war against terrorism.

One of the things the Americans need to do in the war against terrorism is to unlearn the lessons of Vietnam.

Exactly. We don't have a guerrilla force trying to conquer or secure territory. This isn't about land or a nation, like Vietnam was. This is about an ideology born of a religion which says, literally that the only "good" infidel is a "dead" infidel. Its not about conquering America or the west. Its about killing those who don't believe. Its about an winner take all perpetual war until one of the sides is destroyed.

The choice the United States has is not between war and peace. The enemy it faces does not understand peace. As a statement attributed to Osama bin Laden, and addressed to the Europeans, said recently, there can be no peace with the "infidel."

The choice here is between war and endless war. This is not an enemy that could be drawn into Paris "peace talks" to win Nobel Prizes for the participants.

Kerry says "We need to be looked up to, and not just feared." Yet, while it is always pleasant to be looked up to, what is needed now is that the terrorists, and their allies and patrons, should fear the United States. The bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of this world are unlikely to look up to the United States. But they can be made to fear it, to the point of running to hide in caves and holes.

Two points. I agree with Tahri when he says the choice is between "war and endless war". There is no "peace" to be had in this war as the other side's ideology won't allow it. We can't negotiate with this enemy. It is an all or nothing proposition for them. We have to understand this and make a determined effort to end the war by destroying them or be prepared to wage perpetual war with them. The lessons of Vietnam do not teach us anything in this regard except we must have the will to see it through. The one thing Kerry demonstrated with his opposition to the Vietnam war is he does not have that sort of fortitude.

As for the left's need to be liked (I say liked instead of respected because its obvious we're respected by the actions of both NoKo and Lybia) is why they've turned the language on its ear and call that desire a drive for 'respect'. You don't have to be liked to be respected, and I promise you, after Afghanistan and Iraq, we're respected in the world, to include a new-found respect by radical Islam. You don't hear the "paper tiger" talk in bin Laden's tapes anymore, do you? Whether we're ever "liked" by all is absolutely irrelevant to me. Respect, yes. Liking, don't care.

Kerry says he would wage "a smarter, more effective war on terror."

Ok, but how?

First, he would "ask hard questions and demand hard evidence."

But when it comes to terrorism, hard questions don't necessarily produce hard evidence. Often, such evidence becomes available only after an attack, not before.

Anyway, once a President Kerry has asked his hard questions and obtained his hard evidence, he would only be at the start of a long road to a policy. He would next have to persuade other nations (variously described in his speech as "allies," "erstwhile allies" and simply "others") to accept his "hard evidence" and side with the United States. Then the whole matter would have to be taken to unspecified "international institutions," supposedly for approval.

After that? Here is Kerry's answer: "Only then with confidence and determination we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose, we will win!"

Will such a warning make the bin Laden and Saddam Husseins of this world tremble?

For a guy who spent so much time on the Senate Intelligence committee (the same guys who were blasted by the 9/11 Commission in terms of poor congressional oversight), Kerry seems a bit ignorant about what products intelligence agencies produce. They provide analysis. They provide assessments. They provide probabilities. They rarely, if ever, provide "facts".

They provide their products to leaders who's job is to make hard decisions based on these analysis, assessments and probabilities. If these agencies produced facts, there'd be WMDs in Iraq right now, wouldn't there?

So what Kerry is promising here is paralysis in face of a lack of irrefutable facts from intelligence agencies. But playing along, only when he has these "irrefutable facts" would he begin to enlist allies. Well great, but what if they say, "not in or best interest" or "gee that's nice but we have other priorities?"

The fact that there are irrefutable facts about some terrorist organization does not automatically mean allies are going to be interested in taking part in some operation. For whatever reason, Kerry seems to think it is the lack of these facts which kept some from participating in Iraq. In fact those who chose not to participate had precisely the same "facts" we did, but chose not to respond as we did. How does Kerry plan to handle that reality?

Tahri then points to some Kerry hypocricy and inconsistency:

Kerry also says: "We need to build our alliances, so that we can get the terrorists before they get us." Yet he also says: "I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security."

Well, that is what Bush did when he led the war to liberate Iraq. And this is what President Bill Clinton had done when he sent troops to break the Serbian fascists in Bosnia and, later, in Kosovo. In both cases, the U.N. Security Council had indicated its unwillingness to back the American position.

Kerry, however, has made his strategy conditional on support from unidentified allies.

So obviously, as pointed out here, preemption isn't a "new" policy. Nor is Iraq the "first war of choice". And, interestingly, in all three cases cited, the UN refused to sanction these American led resolutions of the problems at hand.

Neither Clinton or Bush made their willingness to do such a thing contingent on the support of "allies" or the UN. Kerry has.

And Kerry has also mischaracterized the effort in Iraq as "going it alone" when in fact it involves most of Europe and most of NATO.

But who are these allies?

A majority of NATO members backed the United States in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as did a majority of the European Union members, plus Japan. In the Balkans, Greece alone of NATO members led the opposition to U.S. policies. In the case of Iraq, France played that role.

Thus what Kerry's offers amounts to nothing but bringing occasional dissidents such as Greece and France on board. Is that so important in the larger scheme of things? Americans might be surprised to learn that "we will win" if, and only if, French President Jacques Chirac agrees to join Kerry in fighting al Qaeda or in deploying NATO forces to Iraq.

But what if the Americans have no support from other nations and yet need to fight against an enemy? This is not a hypothetical question: It happened to the British in 1939-40, when they had to fight Hitler alone.

Essentially Kerry and the Democrats claim is that you aren't multilateral enough unless France and Germany are with you. Of course that's simply poppycock. Tahri's last question is the important question. I have no confidence that if faced with that dilemma Kerry would 'go it alone' if necessary.

Kerry says: "I will never hesitate to use force when it is required; any attack will be met with swift and certain response." This means that Kerry's strategy in the war against terrorism is reactive, not pro-active.

He also says: "The frontlines of this battle are right here on our shores", and then proposes a series of new security measures, especially for container ships and airports.

But while such defensive measures might be necessary, it is vital to take the war to the terrorists.

It is important that fear should change camp: Instead of Americans living in fear, make sure that the terrorists and their sympathizers do. In this war, search-and-destroy tactics must play a central role for victory, the only acceptable outcome, to be achieved.

It is the tenet of the War on Terror which Kerry doesn't necessarily understand. You can't sit here in the US and wait for them to attack us and then respond. To win the War on Terror the war must be taken to the terrorists, allies or no allies. Multilatreally or if necessary, unilaterally.

Kerry says: "The United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to."

This is stating the obvious. The problem arises when you have to go to war but you don't want to. There are also times when you do not have to go to war, but want to because you wish to topple mass-murderers like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

Kerry's position on Iraq is an exercise in ambiguity. In 1991, he voted against the use of force to drive Saddam out of Kuwait, although that had been unanimously approved in the U.N. Security Council. Later, he said he regretted that vote. In 2002, he voted for toppling Saddam by war, although this did not have specific U.N. support. And now he implies that he regrets that vote, too.

As a multilateralist, Kerry should have voted for intervention in Kuwait in '91 and against intervention in Iraq in '02. But, each time, he did the opposite.

Kerry says he will reform the American intelligence services so that "policy is guided by facts."

Intelligence, however, is seldom capable of producing facts. The best it can do is to point at probabilities. But even when it can provide facts, war decisions are made on the basis of a leader's political judgment. A leader is not a computer which, when fed with certain facts, decrees war. And going to war is too serious a decision to be left to spooks.

Here's the problem with Kerry's quote. We have done precisely that, in the Balkans ... and Kerry was in favor of that. But Kuwait was a war of necessity as it threatened our national interest. Kerry voted against that one. How does one, based on those two examples, come to the conclusion that Kerry is serious about his claim, or that he even understands the difference he's espousing? His record indicates exactly the opposite of his claim.

Tahri's last point is critical. Leader's declare war, not intelligence agencies. Intelligence agencies provide their best guesses and leaders make decisions based on those and other factors. Kerry is of the opinion that decision should be foregone when it gets to him and all he would have to do is rubber stamp it. If that's how he see's his job, then we don't really need him, do we?

The most disturbing idea that Kerry launched, however, came when he spoke of a message that he would send to American troops on the first day of his presidency: "You will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace."

Logically, this means: never.

No one enters a war with a precise plan for peace. When President Franklin D Roosevelt declared war against the Axis, he did not have a plan for peace. And what could be the "plan for peace" that any U.S. president could offer before committing American troops to combat in the war against terrorism?

Should America stop the war against terrorism until a "plan for peace" is drawn up? Will a Kerry administration withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan before they are stabilized and democratized?

These questions need to be debated during the campaign.

Kerry was nonchalant about the nuclear build-up by North Korea and Iran.

He dismissed the issue with an anodyne phrase: "We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation."

Just an effort, nothing more.

Excellent points about winning the peace. When was the Marshalll plan envisioned? Not before WWII, that's for sure. How was Japan's future planned? After the war when McArthur took over the occupation.

Any plan must have a foundation of facts. And those facts may or may not be obvious, evident or available before or during the war. To pretend that in the future Kerry and the boys can and will anticipate all contingencies and have concrete plans for "the peace" in place is simply disingenuous and naive. It again speaks to his lack of experience in these things to put forth such a naive promise.

Tahri's column is extremely important to those who want to understand the difficulties with Kerry's "vision" on foreign policy and the War on Terror. His analysis doesn't give one a warm fuzzy feeling when considering the possiblity of John Kerry at the helm of this particular boat.

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