|
|
|
|
10/7/04 The Kerry Doctrine John Kerry claims that, if elected President, he will conduct a more effective, more efficient diplomatic policy and that his military strategy will be better than Bush's (which means nearly flawless, a standard which no President has ever reached). The only evidence he offers is his own rhetoric. It is therefore necessary to take his own statements at face value and extrapolate them to their logical conclusions in order to construct the full range of his hypothetical policy. The 'Global Test' Giving Kerry the benefit of the doubt, I assume by this he means what he said in the debate last Thursday night (Sept. 30, 2004), and elaborated by John Edwards in the debate Tuesday night (Oct. 5, 2004) which was that the arguments put forth by the President of the United States (POTUS) must convince the world community that the action was, and remains, justified. But what degree of consensus is required is absolutely unclear. What if 60% of the world's U.N. delegates agree that the reasons justify war? Is that sufficient? Or does it require 75% or even more? Do the votes of the people we are attacking count, or not? I suspect they would never concede that any action we might contemplate against them was justified. So we have to admit that, for the moment, we cannot gauge what the "Global Test" really means. 'No International Veto' Kerry has also said (and Edwards has echoed repeatedly) that he would "never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security." This means he cannot submit his policy decisions to any kind of vote which, if the results were negative, would convince him not to go through with them. That would constitute a veto. He cannot ask one leader to validate his decisions and then rescind them if the leader says "Nay" without violating his own supposedly clear statement of policy. Any attempt at all to gauge world reaction to a policy decision, if the assessment of the reaction would cause him to change his decision, would amount to a veto. Therefore he can never pause to poll world opinion after he has taken a decision, but only before he has made a decision. Presumably, then, in order to ensure that his decisions will "pass the global test", he will have to attempt to gauge world opinion in some manner prior to making a decision about what is in the interests of U.S. national security. We will still have to concede that there is no way to know how he might propose to gauge world opinion, but it is probably fair to assume that he would at least have to begin by laying before the world or some representative body of the world (the U.N. comes to mind) the various options, and in some way measure the various reactions to those options. It is therefore fair to conclude that, while he avoids giving the world a veto over his decisions, in order to ensure that his decisions will "pass the global test," he will have to have them ratified ahead of time by the global authority he intends to use as the gauge. The Standard of Proof You might think that, having established the logical conclusion that Kerry's doctrine will require him to get some kind of ratification of his decisions prior to making them, we would have recovered the doctrine sufficiently to terminate our examination. But nothing could be farther from the truth. As it turns out, his doctrine ends up destroying itself in a web of inconsistencies when we consider the standard of proof he would have to adhere to to avoid the traps he has laid for Bush and, by extension, for himself should he become President. When Bush made his argument for war, the one thing that the entire world community nearly unanimously believed about the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was that it was hiding stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This was the conclusion of the intelligence departments of many world and regional powers, including the French. Thus Bush's decision, and his justification, while not resting exclusively on that point, rested in part on a consensus about the threat of WMD that Kerry himself never questioned at the time. It is, therefore, obvious that at the time Bush made the argument, the proposed policy for war could not have failed the "global test" on the basis that the argument about WMD was incorrect, because almost no one at the time believed it was false, but there were nevertheless many who made clear by their words and actions that they did not think the policy would pass such a test. It is therefore the case either that 1) Bush's policy would have failed the global test even if we had found stockpiles of WMD in Iraq or 2) his policy would have passed the test at the time he enacted it, but that further revelations can cause the world to rescind its original blessing of the policy. This is the death knell for Kerry's doctrine. Even if he ensures that at a given moment in time the world will ratify his policy decisions prior to their being taken, he cannot guarantee that at some future time the "global test" will not be applied again and his policies found wanting because of new information. Therefore, in addition to ensuring that the world will ratify his policies prior to his making them on the basis of his arguments, he must also guarantee that the evidence bolstering his arguments cannot turn out later to be flawed. He can therefore never act on the basis of intelligence when the intelligence is built on the kind of scattered evidence on which it is almost always based. If the intelligence community can say that they believe North Korea has from four to seven nuclear warheads, but they cannot produce photographs or hard proof, then he cannot act, because there is the chance that, like Saddam Hussein, the regime in North Korea is either fooling itself and the world or just fooling the world into thinking they have something that in fact they do not. If he took action that the world would ratify and then the basis turned out to be faulty, he would be stuck in the situation he had promised he would never be stuck in: fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and being forced to try to convince the world to help him win it, anyway. And if he kept his pledge to "level with the American people and the world," he would be forced to admit that he had been wrong all along, that he had dishonestly misled everyone into following him into a war that turned out not to be justified. And he would then ask them to help him and he would be laughed out of the room and sent packing. He might dream that he can convince the world to follow him, if he is elected President, in fighting the war he has declared a singular injustice that we have to win, since he can say he didn't start it and is just cleaning up someone else's mess. Of course, this by itself is poppycock. But it is infinitely clearer that he would either be so hobbled by the rhetorical traps he has set for himself that he could never take any action that might be the slightest bit risky or controversial, or he would take actions and then find himself in situations a hundred times less tenable than the situation we face in Iraq, since at least in Iraq our troops are bolstered by a President who believes in what they are doing and our enemies know that he intends to kill them. The Kerry doctrine is an incoherent web of pitfalls and traps through which neither he nor any other president could ever navigate and remain effective. It is a sham set of platitudes that undercut each other and leave nothing but a void once all the inconsistencies have been sorted out. Kerry's doctrine of leadership is the doctrine of empty rhetoric backed up by nothing. That is a recipe for disaster in the post-9/11 world. Our enemies would have a field day with a crippled presidency, which is what the Kerry doctrine would yield. Modified: 10/12/2004 |
|
|
All Original Content (C) 2003, 2004, 2005 SoothSeeker.Com
SoothSeeker Welcomes your Comments at letters@soothseeker.com Report problems to webmaster@soothseeker.com
Hits on this site:
|