John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools (Uh . . right)

One of the more amusing spectacles of these less-than- amusing times is the emergence of a Kerry fan club among European anti-war enthusiasts. The letter-writing campaign of The Guardian to the voters of Clark County, Ohio, is especially silly, but is only one of many examples.

Of course many people support John Kerry for the next president of the United States for a variety of reasons - he is credible when he promises to cut the Federal deficit, for example. But to support him in the hope that he would make American military policy more doveish is absurd. All the evidence is that he will do the exact opposite.

He has declared that he wants to increase the US Army by two divisions, more than the total of Continental Europe's intervention troops. That too is a credible promise, in part because Iraq has exposed an acute shortage of ground forces and an excess of navy and air force personnel. But beyond any specific policy positions, there is Kerry, the very combative man.

In the televised debates, when President Bush spoke of "defeating terrorism", Kerry invariably spoke of "killing the terrorists". This was not just an electoral pose: the words accurately reflect the character of the man. He is a fighter, a two-fisted brawler. In all his past electoral campaigns, successful or otherwise, he was always the more aggressive candidate, ready to make wild accusations he knew to be false in the hope that some voters would believe even the incredible. At the moment he is telling older voters that Bush has a secret plan to cut their pensions by 45 per cent, and younger voters that Bush has a secret plan to re-introduce compulsory military service.

And Kerry was certainly a fighter in Vietnam. Like many other well-born Americans of the time, Kerry already opposed the war as contrary to US strategic and economic interests (not as a pacifist) when he volunteered for an extra tour of duty in Vietnam, having already served his compulsory year safely aboard ship.

As all the world knows by now, he won a Silver Star by beaching the boat he commanded, to jump off in pursuit of a Viet Cong guerrilla, whom he shot dead. He did not have to be in Vietnam, he could have been at home; he did not have to beach the boat - the standard tactic would have been to pull back from the shore all guns firing, not ram the prow into the mud. And as commander of the boat, he did not have to chase the guerrilla himself.

He did it all simply because he is a fighter, and a ferocious one. I am quite certain that if Kerry had been president on September 11 he would have reacted more violently than Bush, sending bombers into Afghanistan, not just Special Forces scouts, and demanding immediate co-operation - or else - from Saudi Arabia, not just Pakistan. European anti-militarists have really picked the wrong guy as their hero.

It is true that Kerry opposed the 1991 Gulf War (as did Senator Nunn, among other certified hawks) but he urged the use of force in Bosnia, regretted the failure to invade Rwanda before that, approved the Panama intervention of the first President Bush and was an enthusiast for the 1999 Kosovo war, before voting in favour of the war in Iraq. If Kerry is elected next month, he will certainly not act out his apparently clear-cut opposition to the war by immediately withdrawing US forces from Iraq - although even the Bush Administration is pursuing a form of disengagement, striving to add to the number of Iraqi police and National Guard as quickly as possible rather than sending more US troops. With a rifle strength of well under 60,000, there are not even enough American soldiers to control the Baghdad area, let alone the whole Sunni triangle.

Kerry is unlikely to change course. He too will pursue disengagement, with the aim of leaving Iraq to its elected government after January, with as much of an army, national guard and police force as can be built up in the meantime.

The only difference - and here is the greatest irony - is that Kerry would almost certainly disengage more slowly than Bush simply as a matter of political positioning: he is the one more vulnerable to accusations of abandoning Iraq to Islamic fanatics, warlord-priests and Saddam loyalists.

It is not just over Iraq that the hawkish Kerry will confound European liberals. He has harshly criticised Bush for not being tough enough with Iran - another irony, because it implies a preference for unilateral action rather than the multilateral diplomacy he supposedly espouses.

Iran's fanatical priests and Revolutionary Guard thugs, having faked the last elections, now rule the country behind the increasingly thin facade of President Khatami's elected but powerless government. The extremists have been playing a diplomatic game with the E3 - Britain, France and Germany - and with the International Atomic Energy Authority, while using Iran's oil revenues to import all the missile components and nuclear equipment they can.

The Bush Administration has looked over the options for direct action, everything from air strikes to sabotage but, increasingly committed in Iraq, it has done nothing. It has instead focused on diplomacy to restrict Iranian imports of forbidden materials from Russia and China, and on intelligence operations to shut down smuggling networks.

All that is crucial, because in spite of boasts of self-sufficiency, Iran can do little on its own. Gaining time is important: the fundamentalists are increasingly unpopular, they represent a shrinking minority of the most backward village population (and that, too, only in the half of the country that is inhabited by Persians as opposed to other ethnic minorities), and they will not be in power for ever.

What would Kerry do differently? Nothing much either way, most likely, but it is simply an administrative inevitability that the air strike and sabotage options will be examined once again. One wonders how The Guardian's editorial would read if bombs ordered by a Kerry White House were to start falling on Natanz and Arak, where the major nuclear facilities are being built.

As for the more prosaic business of day-to-day military policy, Kerry is unlikely to change the Bush plan of removing US forces from Cold War garrisons in western Europe and Korea. Kerry advisers also agree with all the "transformation" programmes of the Bush Administration - the change to aircraft without pilots, to air bombing instead of artillery, to command networks instead of hierarchies, to lighter, higher-quality forces.

Unless Kerry really does ask Congress for the money to add two Army divisions, one will need a microscope to tell the difference in military policy if Kerry wins the election. Perhaps The Guardian and its readers should take a close look at those pictures of Kerry with his shotgun after last week's goose shoot: there goes a genuine American hawk, red in tooth and policy.

Edward Luttwak is a senior fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies

I've come to the conclusion that the left has completely lost their minds.

I expect to see them self-destruct because President Bush is going to win in a landslide. It won't even be close.

Must needs I scratch my head every time a lib speaks? How long must we suffer the torment of having to read imbecilic meanderings like the article posted above? Is there no refuge from the constant battering of the liberal storm of lies and nonsense that beats down on our heads incessantly? Oh God, must the lunatics always out-voice the wise?

I pray we reach safe harbor on Nov. 2nd, that the democrat tempest becomes a mere memory, and that a new dawn will rise on Nov. 3rd marking the beginning of a new age of conservatism, wisdom, and morality .

{meekly shrugs} Just a little conservative lamentation for everyone.

Oh my gosh, I am having such a hard time believing that such drivel is not meant to be funny. Kerry was a ferocious fighter in Vietnam, volunteering for a 2nd tour so he could fight the bad guys, huh?

I knew the English were different but then again maybe not as different. They seem to be echoing the US MSM. Don't they?

He's a former military expert who may be on to something here in the sense that Kerry cannot serve the US's interests and be popular in Europe at the same time. And Europe's Left will be disappointed in him if he were elected, but he won't be. So it's academic at best.

Yep. You got that right. They actually take the narcissist seriously. They must have something funny in their drinking water. Maybe it is mad cow disease run amok? Who knows, but they are clearly disconnected with the truth and with the american people.

"he [Kerry] was always the more aggressive candidate, ready to make wild accusations he knew to be false in the hope that some voters would believe even the incredible."

Well, that part I can believe. We see it every day.

The punchline is this: Luttwak is whacked. He's a pro-Kerry hawk who is telling his pro-Kerry dove pals that Kerry will be a hawk and they'll be crying in their beer.

The punchline is that Luttwak has it backwards ... Kerry *IS* a dove and his 20 year record proves it. Luttwak's examples dont bear scrutiny - all his examples of Kerry's hawkishness is Kerry *talking" hawkish.

But when asked to *act*, Kerry always says no. He balked in 1991, he balked on the $87 billion, and even today you cant get a straight answer on what his real plan is.

Bottom line: Luttwak - and all of us except the America haters - will be dismayed if Kerry wins.

This "analyst" or "senior fellow" or whatever he calls himself has completely missed the boat.

He has picked up on Kerry's defining conduct, but he uses the wrong descriptive terms. A more accurate analysis of Kerry's actions would peg him as a foolhardy, hot-headed glory-seeker. Unfortunately at the same time Kerry is a vacillating coward.

The type is pretty well known among military men. Kipling had it dead to rights in the character of Fulke in Puck of Pook's Hill -

. . . he smoothly set out all his shifts, malices, and treacheries, his extreme boldnesses (he was desperate bold); his retreats, shufflings, and counterfeitings (he was also inconceivably a coward); his lack of gear and honour; his despair at their loss; his remedies, and well-coloured contrivances. Yes, he waved the filthy rags of his life before us, as though they had been some proud banner.

The anti-war Left is kidding themselves. Even more than that, the Left is engaging in a case of mass self-deception. They have to simultaneously believe that Kerry is credible on national security but he will also give into their demands to pull out of Iraq immediately. They have to have confidence that John Kerry is telling the truth while also believing that he is obviously lying.

Everyone with a brain knows that John F'n Kerry will cut and run in Iraq and refuse to pursue terrorists anywhere on the planet. This is why he has the full support of the anti-war lunatics on the left. But he cannot say so, because that would disqualify him from any consideration. The ironic thing is that even amongst the looney left, it would probably disqualify him as well.

I think that Luttwak is absolutely correct, and his article states the case coherently. Rather than giving this a knee-jerk reaction, you should be even MORE opposed to Kerry.

Think about this (and hold your fire until you get to the end....) why is John Kerry opposed to 2nd Amendment rights?

I think that it is a case of projection. Kerry assumes that armed citizens of the USA will act in the way that HE would act when/if provoked--just as he did in Vietnam, shooting that teenage VC IN THE BACK, no less, when the kid had already tossed his weapon.

Some of the Swiftie material has been quite critical of Kerry, stating that he was a 'loose cannon' and simply ignored orders of battle on numerous occasions--which is why his commanders were perfectly happy to let him go back home after only 4 months. And the well-founded speculation that Kerry's discharge from service was NOT 'honorable' would only add weight to this pile.

If you thought Waco was a bit over the top, wait until you see what Kerry will do, domestically, to his enemies...

A more accurate analysis of Kerry's actions would peg him as a foolhardy, hot-headed glory-seeker. Unfortunately at the same time Kerry is a vacillating coward.

In other words, he'll be perfectly happy to commit US troops to some harebrained 'revenge' mission--as long as HE is personally tucked into the White House bunker.

Kipling was a good source, and I think Bill Shakespeare had a couple of similar characters, too.

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