If it's war you want, then go Democrats (Is this article true about Kerry?)

The Austrailian ^ | John Laughland

[Cedar]

John Laughland: If it's war you want, then go Democrats

AS the Bush administration comes under increasing fire for its decision to attack Iraq, Democratic contender John Kerry is profiting from his perceived status as a critic of George W. Bush's foreign policy.

A patrician grandee with a pleasing mix of liberal and patriotic views might seem to many Americans a welcome relief from the bellicose Texan with his faux swagger and his team of men who seem to have military-industrial complex written across their menacing foreheads. But if anti-war Americans do elect Kerry for that reason, they will have duped themselves. Warmongering will be worse under Kerry than under Bush and real peaceniks should therefore vote for Dubya. Bush and Kerry agree on almost everything in foreign policy but, where they disagree, Kerry is more hawkish.

Kerry's statements on foreign policy and homeland security, for example, have attacked Bush as a wet. Kerry said in February: "I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror. I believe he's done too little."

Kerry voted for the war on Iraq and continues to support it wholeheartedly. He said last December that those who continue to oppose the war "don't have the judgment to be president -- or the credibility to be elected president". Kerry does not even say that Bush has jeopardised US security by attacking Iraq instead of facing down the al-Qa'ida threat; he is not Richard Clarke. Instead, Kerry says: "No one can doubt that we are safer -- and Iraq is better -- because Saddam Hussein is now behind bars."

On December 17, Kerry lent credence to the loony theory that Iraq was the author of the September 11 attacks, something Bush has done at least twice. Yet in February Kerry attacked Bush for planning to hand back power to the Iraqis too quickly -- what he called "a cut and run" strategy -- even though Bush intends the US embassy in Iraq to be the biggest US embassy in the world and even though 110,000 US troops are to remain stationed there indefinitely.

Above all, Kerry is, like Bush, committed to the world military supremacy of the US. "We must never retreat from having the strongest military in the world," says the possible future president. Kerry claims that Bush has weakened the military and so he has promised 40,000 more active-duty army troops.

Kerry is more hawkish than Bush about the threat from Islam in general and about Saudi Arabia in particular. Both of these are favourite neo-conservative themes. While Bush has often emphasised that the US has no quarrel with Islam, Kerry happily speaks about the specific danger to the US from the Islamic world, using language that is not substantially different from that in the latest neo-con manifesto, An End to Evil by Richard Perle and David Frum.

Kerry explicitly lists certain populations as representing a special danger to the US - Saudi Arabians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indonesians and Pakistanis - and he reproaches Bush's grandiose plan to democratise the entire Middle East not for its overweening ambition but for its timidity.

Kerry has attacked the Bush administration for adopting a kid gloves approach to the Saudi kingdom, which he has repeatedly accused of complicity in the funding of Islamic extremism and terror, and he has said the Saudi interior minister is guilty of "hate speech" and of promoting "wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories". This recalls Frum and Perle's surprising classification of Saudi Arabia as "an unfriendly power". Serious neo-cons, indeed, might be calculating that the bungling Bush is more of a liability than an asset for their desire to remodel the Middle East and to consolidate the US's unchallenged military power.

Kerry might be just what they need to draw the sting of that left-wing anti-Americanism around the world and in the US that inspires so much anti-war feeling. The Kosovo war showed that a war for human rights and against oppression, fought by a slick Democrat, plays far better with world public opinion than all that red-neck bull about dangers to national security. It will be far easier for president Kerry to fight new wars than for the mistrusted and discredited Bush. So to those who think that the election of a Democratic president will put an end to US militarism, I say: You ain't seen nothin' yet.

John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. A longer version of this appeared in The Spectator.

[Cedar]

Is this guy for real? Guess I don't know anything about Kerry's stand on foreign policy. I thought Kerry was just the opposite of what this guy says.

Anyway, this Laughland fella sounds pretty arrogant. If more leaders had the common sense of your typical "red-neck," the world would be a better place.

[areafiftyone]

Kerry is now trying to pain himself as a centrist. He has been saying that Spain's pullout is wrong, that the Hamas leader's killing was right, that if we pull our troops out it is wrong and now he is down in Florida with Joe Lieberman campaigning. Kerry is starting to piss off alot of anti-war liberals.

[areafiftyone]

pain=paint

[TomGuy]

Kerry wets his finger, sticks it in the air to see which way his policy should be for a particular group.

Kerry's speech given her has not relation to his speech given there.

At least Clinton went with the direction of the daily polls.

Kerry just goes with whichever way the wind blows.

[Cedar]

Oh, so that would explain it. This guy in Austrailia is falling for it.

I haven't been keeping up with Kerry's antics lately. Thanks.

[Cedar]

Or where ever he's from....

[KellyAdmirer]

Sure, Kerry, if elected, would win solely because of votes of people who are against the war - any war, in fact. But he is supposed to be more likely to fight necessary wars to defend America?

This fellow has been partying too much.

[wingster]

Antics indeed! It's like a six ring circus with the ringmaster on acid.

Kerry should just go on vacation until the end of September and then come back out and see if people have forgotten him so that he has a prayer in the election.

I can see the first debate now; Bush steps up to the podium. Kerry's head will look like that "cabbage head" in Star Trek.

[dufekin]

Kerry manages to take so many sides of every possible issue that I am sure that selectively picking his policy analysis on certain days would lead one to this conclusion.

But let us not forget this: Kerry may support the troops, but he expects them to pay for the cost of rebuilding Iraq from their own pockets while raising their taxes and [probably] not raising their salaries to compensate. Kerry, the haughty, French-looking liberal junior distinguished Senator from the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by the way served in Vietnam. He is a man of the common people, having only a few hundred million dollars to his name; therefore, do not forget he understands the plight of the solider.

[TomGuy]

A comprehensive listing is being compiled:

John Kerry's Flip Flops (extensive documentation)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1119904/posts

[areafiftyone]

LOL - Kerry is taking an page from Al Gore. That man knows he is the most boring person on the face of the earth so he has decided to become a piece of driftwood!

[Mogollon]

No wonder the Aussie's allowed their gov't. to disarm them. They are evidently easily fooled.

[binger]

A finger in the wind...

[MegaSilver]

The Kosovo war showed that a war for human rights and against oppression, fought by a slick Democrat, plays far better with world public opinion than all that red-neck bull about dangers to national security.

Umm... I've heard other things.

[MegaSilver]

Kerry is now trying to pain himself as a centrist. He has been saying that Spain's pullout is wrong, that the Hamas leader's killing was right, that if we pull our troops out it is wrong and now he is down in Florida with Joe Lieberman campaigning.

But he'll still take away our guns, and that makes him a liberal.

[areafiftyone]

Oh he's a liberal all right. The problem with Kerry is that noone really likes his personality and he thinks painting himself as a centrist is going to do it. That man was choosen out of desperation because Dean screwed up not because the dems love him. He just doesn't realize that yet.

[HardStarboard]

I got a big laugh out of John Laughland. Holy smokes, what an appropriate name for a trustee of the "British Helsinki Human Rights Group!!

As has been said here before:

Bwwwahahahahahahahahahah!

[Milligan]

If Kerry gets elected he will wipe the whole Iraqi reconstruction to UN authority. Guess who will foot the bill? The US. Gee? Am I becoming apart of John Birch Society? Here's a site showing how UN peacekeeper's un-operate.


http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekpg/index.htm

[Milligan]

Here is the offical UN Peacekeeper's Guide.


http://www.justint.org/the%20future%20for%20un%20peacekeeping.htm