Here's my favorite part.
If Kerry is dogged and haunted by the accusation of wanting everything twice over, he has come by the charge honestly. In Vietnam, he was either a member of a ''band of brothers'' or of a gang of war criminals, and has testified with great emotion to both convictions. In the Senate, he has either voted for armament and vigilance or he has not, and either regrets his antiwar vote on the Kuwait war, or his initial pro-war stance on the Iraq war, or his negative vote on the financing of the latter, or has not. The Boston Globe writers capture a moment of sheer, abject incoherence, at a Democratic candidates' debate in Baltimore last September:
''If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.''
And all smart people know how to laugh at President Bush for having problems with articulation.
Actually, when Kerry sneered at ''the coalition of the willing'' as ''a coalition of the coerced and the bribed,'' at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, no less, he was much more direct and intelligible. Yet I somehow doubt that he would repeat those clear, unmistakable words if confronted by the prime ministers of Britain, Poland or Australia. And how such an expression is likely to help restore America's standing is beyond this reviewer.
One thing that is never made clear to me is which leaders in the world that weren't profiting from Iraqi oil deals are angry at us. Since far more countries supported our actions than opposed them, doesn't Kerry's task of rebuilding those bridges with our opponents threaten to anger our actual allies?
Maybe even more important is why having the world on our side is such a benefit. Being friendly gets us into situations like Bosnia and Haiti. It seems to me that we did ourselves a favor with this war by identifying who are real allies are. Next time the world clamors for our aid we can go down the list and see what they've done for us. Negative two points for countries that were illegally feathering Saddam's nest before the war.
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