Like America's favorite Psychic buddy says (Dionne Warwick): That's what friends are for.
Hehe!
"As has been pointed out at length over recent days, the final verdict on any debate takes two or three days to be rendered. But let me try and pre-empt that now: Bush won not only the debate but, in all probability, the election. Senator Kerry stood up well but, once more, he didn't say anything. In fact, coming out of the debate, I'm less clear as to what Kerry actually thinks about Iraq and the broader War on Terrorism than I was before I went in. Kerry's managed to "win", at least in the initial post-debate spin, simply because he's a better speaker than the President. But no one has yet considered the implications of what the man said during the debate, but merely how prettily he said it.
If he's to be believed (which is an open question) Kerry's foreign policy ideas are potentially the most ruinous proposed by any Presidential candidate since George McGovern in 1972. Senator Kerry proposes an American foreign policy that is consistent only in that it dovetails exactly with the stuff prescribed by the global elites. Kerry's "plan" for Iraq is simply a fantasy. He's going to "call a summit": and do what? Is the man so deluded to think that foreign nations are going to deploy their troops to Iraq simply at his beck and call? Because, if you take out the part about the foreign nations, Senator Kerry doesn't really have a plan.
I'm convinced that, if elected President, Senator Kerry will manage to buy as many African and Asian UN Blue-Helmets as he can and then he'll flee Iraq at a greater-than-deliberate speed. His constant repeating of his bizarre non-plan to have the French, Germans and unidentified "Arab" nations step to the rescue (Jordan doesn't have an Army, so who is he going to ask: Syria? Saudi Arabia?) simply reinforces the idea that he doesn't have a plan to do anything more than sound minimally competent enough to get elected. Kerry also made a number of fundamental mistakes of fact when speaking about the war and foreign policy which, I think, the Bush campaign would be wise to mercilessly pound upon.
First, during the third question, Senator Kerry said that, "The president moved the troops, so he's got 10 times the number of troops in Iraq than he has in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is." This is a potentially huge error, perhaps even a "there is no Soviet domination of Poland" level error. I don't think that anyone in the know thinks that Osama Bin Laden, even if his is alive, is in Afghanistan. Even CNN's reporter pointed this fact out immediately after the end of the debate. If Senator Kerry wants to hammer Bush for getting Osama Bin Laden, he'd damn well better, at the very least, remember which country he's in. And this also, of course, wasn't a slip of the tongue: it was the center of his entire argument on the matter, namely that Bush has, "got 10 times the number of troops in Iraq than he has in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is." Except he's not there, Senator.
The second mistake, again, exposes a fundamental error of policy and reality on Senator Kerry's part and it deserves some real examination. It deserves extensive quotation: "With respect to North Korea, the real story: We had inspectors and television cameras in the nuclear reactor in North Korea. Secretary Bill Perry negotiated that under President Clinton. And we knew where the fuel rods were. And we knew the limits on their nuclear power...While they didn't talk at all, the fuel rods came out, the inspectors were kicked out, the television cameras were kicked out. And today, there are four to seven nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea."
Senator Kerry misses entirely, and presumably his entire national security team misses, the significance of the point that President Bush then raised next when he said, "the breach on the agreement was not through plutonium. The breach on the agreement is highly enriched uranium." That bears repeating: Senator Kerry either didn't know, or hoped the public wouldn't know, the difference between the two and the mechanics of how North Korea developed its nuclear weapons. What happened is this: in 1994 the Clinton Administration, with more than a little help from former President Jimmy Carter, did exactly what Kerry would now have the United States do: they sat down for bilateral talks with the North Koreans and hammered out a deal. As part of that deal, the North Koreans offered seemingly extensive inspection options to prove that they weren't going to go on developing nuclear weapons. After all, having cameras on there, inspectors, and everything else sounds like a fairly secure arrangement: but they found an entirely different way of developing the weapons they wanted and they did so while receiving extensive American aid.
It bears repeating, because Senator Kerry's windy response has hidden within it his real plan for the North Koreans, "I want bilateral talks which put all of the issues, from the armistice of 1952, the economic issues, the human rights issues, the artillery disposal issues, the DMZ issues and the nuclear issues on the table." Read that closely again. "The economic issues." What economic issues? Think about it. Does he mean that North Korea wants to sign a free trade agreement with the United States? Of course not: he means that he plans to follow the Clinton approach of bribing, appeasing, and kicking the problem down the road.
The third issue comes back to the nuclear matters again. This time to Iran. Once more he repeated his absurd plan to have the United States provide "nuclear fuel" to Iran. To describe this as an insane idea would be a very mild way of putting it. It's broadly comparable to giving an enraged spree-killer an AK-47 in an attempt to discover if they can be trusted with automatic weapons. Naturally the Kerry campaign says that they'll have inspections and close controls over the "nuclear fuel" that they plan to give Iran. Yeah and how well did all of those safeguards work out with North Korea?
If the nation wants a President who can deliver lies in a convincing voice, they'll vote for Kerry. If they want a man with a clear vision, steady resolve, and a real plan to win the War on Terrorism, they'll vote for President Bush.
Adam Yoshida is a freelancer writer who runs his own web site.
FReegards...MUD