Same as the Old Boss

Yesterday's piece in the Belmont Club was the best review I've yet seen of the Matt Bay/NYTimesZine piece on Kerry.

Wretchard writes:

Bai's article reminds me of one of those products which are described on the packaging as being a new space age, high-technology, portable illumination aid which on closer inspection turns out to be a flashlight. When the newfangled description of terrorism as a "blended threat" is subtracted, the entire program consists of the policies of the late 1990s. Bilateral talks with North Korea. Oslo. G-8. The United Nations. Warrants of arrest. Extradition requests. Not a single new element in the entire package, except the fancy rationale. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything objectionable about a flashlight, but a more candid characterization of Kerry's proposals is not a voyage into uncharted waters so much as return to the world of September 10; in Kerry's words "back to the place we were". It has the virtue of producing known results, and suffers only from the defect that those results do not include being able to prevent massive attacks on the American mainland.

Everything I've heard from Kerry - everything - as re Iraq and the War on Terror, strikes me as one of two things:

• Recapitulations of what Bush is already doing
• Baked wind - platitides designed to make him look like anything but the Viet-Cong-meeting, Sandinista-appeasing, MIA-ignoring, Nuclear-Freeze-boosting, Desert-Storm-opposing, weapons-program-spiking, peace-dividend-whoring hamster he's always been.

Note that nothing he's said - nothing - isn't capable of being reversed as easily as it was said in the first place.

"But wait", the liberal will say, "Bush reversed himself! He said he wouldn't do any nationbuilding! LIAR! HYPOCRITE!".

Right, he reversed himself because while Bosnians and Haitians and Kosvars weren't going to be flying planes into any of our buildings, terrorists from terror-sponsoring nations did. It's pretty valid grounds for reversal. I don't see him doubling back, do you?

Kerry will reverse himself because he doesn't mean what he's saying now.

Kerry's world, in a way, is where one goes if George Bush's vision proves false: the frying pan, as a place of refuge if one lands in the fire. As a negative vision it will always hold some attractions; which will grow in proportion to failures in the Global War on Terror and fade in proportion to its successes. Roger Simon succinctly described Bai's article as a plea to return to "business as usual", a call to the past from "the ultimate conservative". It is heartbreakingly pathetic in its own way.

As is the belief that Kerry is at all serious about anything but withdrawal from the war on terror.

Kerry's tried to play both sides on this; talking about withdrawal dates to the Deaniacs, then acting tough around moderates. What's he said? He'll "Hunt the terrorists down". Really? And where will you launch the hunt from - Iraq, or the continental US?

Wretchard continues:

I cannot help but think that September 11 was far more tragic to Liberalism than to anyone else. Over time it will be represented as a kind of Fall, the moment Eden was stolen, in a way that an earlier generation saw the Kennedy assassination as the end of a dream and the way some undefined instant in the 1970s marked "the day the music died". The United Nations, the photo opportunities with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, the outward solidarity with Europe must seem so tantalizingly close, an election away; just a month distant, but it may be already past, even with a Kerry presidency.

Remember the Kellogg-Briand pact? In the '30s, a group of internationalists signed a treaty that outlawed war.

It didn't work, of course - there was no impetus, no international sanction powerful enough to overcome the likes of an Adolf Hitler's will to power. The lesson, of course, was that one can not just will oneself back to an earlier era; the Kellogg-Briand signatories couldn't just wish themselves back to the Pax Brittania with its gentlemen's agreements and staid, orderly international order; everything had changed.

And Kerry can not take the world back to September 10 - to the nineties - just on the force of his own wish that it were so. Terrorists were only "nuisances" in the '90s to those who closed their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and sang loudly enough to drown out the evidence.

And despite all his bloviation and his supporters' assurances that Kerry won't leave the Iraqis in the lurch and launch a full-out sprint to 1995-level wishful ignorance, I've seen no evidence that Kerry is doing anything but that.

Posted by Mitch at October 12, 2004 08:37 AM | TrackBack