Posted on 03/12/2004 9:01:04 PM PST by quidnunc
Edited on 03/12/2004 9:17:18 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The 1990's were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.
Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. "There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong" in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, "There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing."
For you see, Kerry continued, "Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used."
In laying out the Kerry Doctrine — that in voting on a use-of-force resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the correct answer is also the correct answer — Kerry was venturing off into the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark so many of his major foreign policy statements.
The next crisis occurred in Somalia. Again, the U.S. Senate faced what appeared to lesser minds as a clear choice: to withdraw in the wake of U.S. casualties or not to withdraw. The oxymoronically gifted junior senator from Massachusetts perceived an equivocation between the modalities: "The choice for the United States of America is not between two alternatives only: staying in or getting out. There are many other choices in-between which better reflect the aspirations and hopes of our country."
Kerry backed a policy of interventionist withdrawal, which jibed with the "third way" option embraced by President Bill Clinton himself. As Kerry noted, "I think that the president today made the right decision to try to establish a process which will maintain the capacity of our forces, protect them, and to disengage while simultaneously upholding the mission we have set out to accomplish."
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/opinion/13BROO.html?ex=1079758800&en=768534507b9c8429&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The monicker is mine, not Brooks'.
LOL. Brooks seems to be taking a page out of Steyne's wonderful notebook.
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