One of Kerry’s greatest rhetorical failures during his presidential campaign was his use of desperate and self-serving assertions that were unsupported by any evidence. Typically he’d say something like, “If I were running the show, things would be better in Iraq now.” He claimed he’d be more subtle and nuanced with our allies, while he insulted the Iraqi government. He suggested he’d reduce the national debt, even while he made numerous commitments to expand government spending. He was as dishonest and self-serving as Bill Clinton or any other politician, but without any finesse or political ability.
He’s running for president again and continuing to make a fool out of himself, as noted by columnist Kathleen Parker:
It takes chutzpah, as they might say in Haifa, to declare that Hezbollah and Israel wouldn’t be fighting now if John Kerry were president. Kerry, who did declare that, apparently has more chutzpah than nuance, as it turns out.
“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said the Massachusetts senator, during a lunchtime visit to “Honest? John’s Bar and No Grill Inc.” in Detroit while campaigning for Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. “The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East. . . . We’re going to have a lot of ground to make up (in 2008) because of it.” Because of Bush’s focus on Iraq, Kerry said, the president failed to address threats posed by other terrorist organizations. . . .
Having managed postwar Iraq better than the Bush administration — and arguably my neighbor’s cat could have — what about Iran? Without Iran’s support and provision of munitions, Hezbollah wouldn’t be kidnapping Israeli soldiers and launching rockets into Israel right now. Might we also assume that under the aura of a President Kerry, the Iranians would have passed on electing the Jew-hating, Holocaust- denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
If only John Kerry had been president, might Iran’s powerful clerics have decided instead to back a more pragmatic Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani? Might we never have heard clerics urging voters to the polls with words like this: “Every vote you cast is a bullet in the heart of America”?
Perhaps, perhaps, but we’ll never know. Given that Iran’s elections were arranged in advance by the country’s clerics, it seems likely we’d be right where we are: Trying to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and from keeping its promise to erase Israel from the map through its terrorist arm, Hezbollah.
Finally, we come to Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians. With his broader focus, could Kerry have dissuaded Palestinians from electing Hamas to govern them? Or Syria to stop funding Hamas? Or prevented southern Lebanese from electing 14 members of Hezbollah to represent them in that country’s Parliament?
These are but some of the events that have transpired in the past year and a half. Whether a different approach to Iraq would have simplified our present task of stabilizing the region is unknowable. But Kerry’s boast in the midst of chaos, death and ruin is an embarrassing expression of political hubris that should make even loyal Democrats cut and run.
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When I look at the dog’s breakfast that G.W. Bush has made of Iraq, I’m inclined to think almost anyone could have handled it better.
John Kerry is the reason I said “almost.”