(William Safire was Richard Nixon's speech-writer and one of the USA's leading conservative thinkers.)
NY Times, October 4, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST Kerry, Newest Neocon By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Washington
As the Democratic Whoopee Brigade hailed Senator Kerry's edge in debating technique, nobody noticed his foreign policy sea change. On both military tactics and grand strategy, the newest neoconservative announced doctrines more hawkish than President Bush.
First, on war-fighting in Iraq: Hard-liners criticized the Bush decision this spring not to send U.S. troops in to crush Sunni resistance in the Baathist stronghold in Falluja. Our forces wanted to fight to win but soft-liners in Washington worried about the effect of heavier civilian casualties on the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and of U.S. troop losses on Americans.
Last week in debate, John Kerry - until recently, the antiwar candidate too eager to galvanize dovish Democrats - suddenly reversed field, and came down on the side of the military hard-liners.
"What I want to do is change the dynamics on the ground," Kerry volunteered. "And you have to do that by beginning to not back off of Falluja and other places and send the wrong message to terrorists. ... You've got to show you're serious." Right on, John! Although he added his standard softener of "sharing the stakes" with "the rest of the world," he issued his radically revised military policy: wipe out resistance in terrorist strongholds like Falluja, which requires us to inflict and accept higher casualties.
Just as Kerry propounded his get-tough tactics, the first phase of the assault on centers of insurgency had begun. U.S. troops, blazing the way for recently trained Iraqi forces, have kept their appointment in Samarra. More than 200 insurgents have been killed or captured in that city in the Sunni triangle, beginning to open the area for elections.
At the same time, our aerial strikes at the safe houses of Zarqawi killers in Falluja have intensified. Kerry's belated but welcome hawkish call to "change the dynamics on the ground" supports the joint U.S.-Iraqi seizure of control of that terrorist haven. It will be bloody, but such use of firepower in "serious" denial of sanctuary should save lives in the long run.
Next, to grand strategy: Kerry was asked by Jim Lehrer, "What is your position on the whole concept of pre-emptive war?" In the past, Kerry has given a safe never-say-never response, but last week he gave a Strangelovian answer: "The president always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike." He pledged never to cede "the right to pre-empt in any way necessary'' to protect the U.S.
But in embracing his right to pre-empt - always derided in horror by the two-minutes-to-midnight crowd as impermissible "preventive war" - Kerry felt the need to interject: "That was a great doctrine throughout the cold war. And it was one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control."
Hold on; nuclear pre-emption was never America's "great doctrine" during confrontation with the Soviets. Our strategic doctrine, which some of us remember, was at first "massive retaliation," later "mutual assured destruction.'' Maybe arms control negotiators listed pre-emption or preventive war as a dangerous notion of extremists, but only kooks portrayed by the likes of Peter Sellers called for a nuclear final solution to the Communist problem.
If Bush had defined pre-emption as such a "great doctrine throughout the cold war," we would have seen sustained snickering on cable and horrified eye-rolling from the Charles River Gang.
Bush did not pick up on Kerry's faulty memory. Instead, the president focused on the Democrat's sugar-coating of his first-strike pill of prevention: his assurance that his pre-emption had to be one that "passes the global test" to make it legitimate. By ridiculing Kerry's notion that such a surprise attack had to have prior world-public approval, Bush was able to prevent his opponent from out-hawkishing him.
On stopping North Korea's nuclear buildup, Kerry abandoned his global-testing multilateralism; our newest neocon derided Bush's six-nation talks and demands America go it gloriously alone. And in embracing Wilsonian idealism to intervene in Darfur's potential genocide, Kerry's promise of troops outdid Pentagon liberators: "If it took American forces to some degree to coalesce the African Union, I'd be prepared to do it. ...''
His abandoned antiwar supporters celebrate the Kerry personality makeover. They shut their eyes to Kerry's hard-line, right-wing, unilateral, pre-election policy epiphany.
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