Still, if there's one thing John Kerry knows, it's that the United Nations is the font of international legitimacy. When young Kerry first ran for Congress in 1970, he told the Harvard Crimson: "I'm an internationalist. I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations." He has matured in the intervening years, and yet ... In 1994, when President Clinton was contemplating U.S. action in Bosnia, Sen. Kerry was asked whether the Balkan War was worth losing American lives. He said: "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
Now that should make Kofi Annan (whose son seems to have made out really well on the oil-for-food program, too, but never mind), Jacques Chirac and all the mullahs of Iran fairly glow with pleasure!
Note Kerry's assumption that if the United States acted "unilaterally" it would necessarily be doing so under a "false presumption that we can affect the outcome." Why is the presumption that American action can affect an outcome false, but an identical U.N. presumption true? And just wondering, wasn't American action rather decisive in World War I, World War II, the Gulf War, Grenada, Panama and too many other places to name?
While Kerry dresses his foreign policy as "internationalism" and "working with allies," in fact it amounts to distrust of American arms. Kerry opposes actions that smack of American self-interest. He was against the re-flagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers, the Gulf War, the liberation of Grenada (which he called a "bully's show of force against a weak Third World nation") and the bombing of Libya following that country's terrorist attack on our troops in Germany, and he now says he's against the Iraq War. This reflexive suspicion of America's need to defend herself is bad enough in a college professor. In a president, it could spell disaster.
Kerry is right about one thing: He would certainly not make the kind of mistakes George W. Bush has made. Bush's errors (and of course, being human, he has committed some) are those of a man with a passion to defend America. Kerry's errors would be those of a livelong dove who has shown himself very wary of expanding America's power.
I know which mistakes I'd prefer. Let's vote.