Refuting Bill Safire's Op-Ed

If you didn't read William Safire's mindless anti-kerry rant I'll spare you the trouble of wasting any energy on it.

Let's get straight to the bullshit after the fold

Bill starts off with the oh so subtle jab

As the Democratic Whoopee Brigade  hailed Senator Kerry's edge in debating technique, nobody noticed his foreign policy sea change.

I think what he means by "Democratic Whoopee Brigade" is the 60+ percent of Americans who watched the debate and saw Kerry as the winner.

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.

Yeah, some of those hardliners, notably Bush himself called for "head to roll," but then "flip-flopped" after going into Falluja without a plan to win back "the hearts and minds of its people." But nice way to insinuate that Democrats are the "soft-liners" who undermined the troops' efforts to "win" (as if that were possible).

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."

Way to miss a huge distinction, Billy; Kerry was against rushing to war, but now that we're there he asserts that have to fight it the right way. Kerry himself invoked Powell's "pottery-barn" doctrine: you break it, you own it. Kerry is saying he wouldn't have broken Iraq, but now that it's shattered, we need to glue the pieces back together the right way and not do some half-assed ducktape job.

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.

So Bill is lauding the fact that we had to RETAKE a city back from insurgents? Wouldn't that be a bad thing for Bush, especially since he let things get like this in the first place? Kerry was criticizing Bush for letting the insurgency become as strong as it is; just become the Bush team has all of a sudden become "tough" again doesn't refute Kerry's assertion that they have been woefully inadequate in dealing with the insurgency in the past.

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.

Because our attack on Iraq was such a "surprise"... More on this at the end.

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.'"

If I'm not mistaken, Bill, isn't it neoconservative not to engage in bilateral talks with a country? Wasn't it Bill Clinton, the antithesis of the neoconservative movement, who engaged North Korea in bilateral talks? And didn't Kerry call for both bilateral and mutilateral talks with North Korea? I'd love to hear how bilateral talks fall in with the "go it alone" mentality, especially when even China is calling for us to speak with the North Koreans civilly.

Oh, and way to distort Kerry's words "If it took American forces to some degree to coalesce the African Union, I'd be prepared to do it." to make it seem like he wants to go it alone in the Sudan. I believe "coalesce the African Union" is a pretty specific way of saying that Kerry would expect the African Union to provide troops as well. In fact, the definition of coalesce means "to grow together, to unite." So by definition Kerry's statement is anything but unilateral, but I digress...

"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."

Well, there goes the last of your credibility, Mr. Safire. I liked especially how you mentioned "the Kerry personality makeover" which the GOP talking points had blabbered about during the Democrat Convention. So asking to give weapons inspectors a chance is "hard-line", "right-wing" and neoconservative. I guess it's pretty "unilateral" to try and get France and Russia on board with the invasion too. But what is most rich is Safire's inability to draw the distinction between Kerry's opposition to the way Bush went to war (rushing, refusing to give inspectors a chance, and lying about/overstating evidence), and the principle of ever going to war. Still, it was a nice strawman.