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Duelfer Damns U.N. With a presidential election less than a month away and the press and the Democrats eager to discredit the Bush administration, most of what we've been hearing about the final report of Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, issued yesterday, has centered on the question of whether Saddam Hussein's regime possessed stockpiles of mass-destruction weapons. The U.S. and most other world intelligence services believed it did, and this was among the justifications for Iraq's liberation last year. The absence of such stockpiles is supposed to prove that the U.S.-led coalition was wrong to liberate Iraq--that Saddam Hussein did...

COLUMBUS, Ohio Oct. 2, 2004 — President Bush on Saturday ridiculed what he called the "Kerry doctrine" as a dangerous outsourcing of America's security, seeking to poke a hole in Sen. John Kerry's debate performance with what advisers see as his rival's biggest miscue. "When he laid out the Kerry doctrine, he said that America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves," Bush said, drawing loud boos from a friendly crowd at a National Association of Home Builders meeting. "When our country is in danger, it is not the president's job to...

In one of my favorite episodes of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye and Trapper John were desperate to procure a medical incubator. They found their way to a corrupt supply sergeant who had three. The sergeant explained that he couldn't give the docs one of his incubators because, if he did, then he wouldn't have three anymore. He'd only have two, and two is worse than three. This seems like the perfect metaphor for the "Kerry Doctrine." With the constant promises from almost every speaker at the Democratic convention that a President Kerry would create "strong alliances" as his backdrop, John Kerry declared...

Someday, when the passions of this election have subsided, historians and analysts of American foreign policy may fasten on a remarkable passage in John Kerry's nomination speech. "As president," Kerry declared, "I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation." The statement received thunderous applause at the convention and, no doubt, the nodding approval of many Americans of all political leanings who watched on television. Only American diplomatic historians may have contemplated...

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,...

<p>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.</p>