Skerry Kerry's muddy vision
It takes a screwball as you might say, to declare that Hezbollah and Israel wouldn't be fighting now if John Kerry were president.
Kerry, who did declare that, apparently has more loose screws, than nut farm as it turns out.
"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened,'' said the Massachusetts senator, during a lunchtime visit in Detroit while campaigning for Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Because of Bush's focus on Iraq, Kerry said, the president failed to address threats posed by other terrorist organizations.
"He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq," said Kerry. And then,
"We have to destroy Hezbollah."It's impossible, of course, to know what we'd have been watching on television the past several days had Kerry been elected president. Would Hezbollah not have attacked Israel? To answer that, we have to back up a few steps and first ask whether we would have been less focused on Iraq had Kerry been elected in 2004.
Although Kerry voted for the Iraq invasion, he voted against $87 billion in supplemental funding to pay for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Thanks PR) His "no" vote followed the defeat of an amendment he co-sponsored that would have rolled back tax cuts to help defray the cost of funding the war. Whatever his motivations, the vote contributed to his most infamous "flip-flop".
Over time, Kerry clearly changed his mind about our position in Iraq, so might we gather that he'd have done things differently? Let's pretend (a word Skerry knows all to well.) that he could have soothed insurgents and terrorists alike and that, by now, most American troops would be home and Iraq would be enjoying the fruits of a fully functioning government.
We'll give him that tea leaf. Having managed postwar Iraq better than the Bush administration, and arguably my neighbor's dog could have, what about Iran? Without Iran's support, Hezbollah wouldn't be kidnapping Israeli soldiers and launching rockets into Israel right now. Might we also assume that under Kerry, the Iranians would have passed on electing the Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying ImaginAdud?
(Thanks 2T)Might Iran's powerful clerics have decided instead to back a more pragmatic Ali Akbar Rafsanjani? Might we never have heard clerics urging voters to the polls with words like "Every vote you cast is a bullet in the heart of America''?
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.
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.
Kerry did get one thing perfectly right when he said we need to destroy Hezbollah. Israel apparently is aiming to do just that. Whatever might have been two years ago, Israel today must be grateful that George Bush is its wingman.
