International Episode

spd rdr sent me this incredible WSJ piece yesterday, and it just blew me away. Not that it takes that much to blow my mind these days. At any rate, I suspect mr. rdr sends these things just to sit back and watch the inevitable implosion. The entire article is well worth reading, but it requires a subscription.

My impression actually is that people on both sides of the presidential divide are despondent about their candidate, although I am really only expert about Democrats. I am the editor in chief of a (neo) liberal weekly and live in Cambridge, Mass., where I watched last week's debate with (not neo) liberal friends. Almost no one among such supporters of John Kerry really likes him, it seems, and no one especially respects him either. But they are panicked that he will lose.

Which is why Mr. Kerry's answer to Jim Lehrer's first question last Thursday -- "Do you think you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the U.S.?" -- was such a downer.

There seems to be some personal anxiety underlying almost everything Mr. Kerry thinks about U.S. foreign policy. He craves the approval of Europeans, as if he were some American arriviste right out of a Henry James novel. (Teresa is a different kind of James character. [Ed. Note: The Heiress, perhaps? thud...]) Early on in the campaign, he claimed that he had met with foreign leaders and they had told him they preferred him to Bush -- as if that were a bona fide to American voters. I can't count how many times I've heard Kerry people -- not Kerry -- tell me that the Germans and the French, the Swedes and all of the Arabs dislike Bush and want Kerry to win. So what! Or, on the other hand, maybe it is really quite telling that the Arabs so much prefer Kerry.

Once I'd gotten over the usual shock at hearing a Democrat admit this and yet lament the possibility that Kerry might lose the election, I continued reading:

In any case, he is obsessed with the United Nations and our "alliances." In something like 40 minutes of his having the microphone in the debate, Sen. Kerry alluded to the U.N., alliances, allies, and summits fully 27 separate times, about one reference to every minute-and-a-third, always charging President Bush with ignoring them. This means something, and what it means first of all is that Sen. Kerry has confidence that the U.N. (nine mentions) is still a force for good in the world. But the U.N. was designed to protect the territorial integrity of established states, to protect Poland, so to speak, from Germany or Indonesia from the Netherlands. The most disastrous wars now being waged, however, are the near-genocides within established borders, like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and at this very moment in the Sudan.

This was the paragraph that brought me up short. Because to the Croissants-and-Kumbaya crowd, humanitarian crusades like Darfur which serve no discernable national security interest are the only permissable reason for military intervention. They are the Breakfast of Champions: the only Raisin D'Etre that should ever be seen on Donald Rumsfeld's breakfast table.

And they are precisely the type of crusade the UN has no interest in pursuing. With good reason. How long would the United Nations last if its charter included the ability to wantonly interfere in the internal affairs of member nations? Who would join if membership meant ceding away national sovreignty?

As the U.N. did nothing when Saddam Hussein was murdering Iraq's Kurds and Shiites in the hundreds of thousands, it has been less than passive in these cases, passing vaguely reproachful resolutions reluctantly and, in any case, without effect. (The first precedent for these refusals of responsibility was the U.N.'s siding with Nigeria against the Ibos of Biafra 45 years ago, and now you have Nigeria, a monument to brutality, corruption and religious violence, also the main power in the African Union, which is put forward as the apt gendarmerie for Darfur.) The U.N.'s very structure makes it hostage to the five permanent members of the Security Council and to their particular, often pecuniary, interests. (France holds one of these post-World War II "big power" seats only because de Gaulle persuaded Churchill and FDR to pretend that the French actually fought the Nazis. This is a seat that would more aptly be filled by India.) The very essence of the international system is very different from what it once was, and Sen. Kerry cannot or will not see it.

The author forgets that Mr. Kerry's father was a Foreign Service officer. His deference to the French is honestly come by. Surprisingly, unlike the Shrub, who has deftly played Old vs. New Europe, shuffling overseas troops deployments and thoroughly discomfiting two of the three Great Colonial powers, Kerry (the son of a FSO) shows little aptitude for the Game of Houses. If one did not know better, one might suspect a lack of nuance.

Mr. Kerry claimed in the debate that, had the U.S. gone back to the Security Council on Iraq yet again (and, presumably, again), our "allies" would have finally supported the war in Iraq. He is smoking weed. Our "allies," in this case Russia and France, were actually functional allies, really partners of the Baathist regime in Baghdad, and these two states had been mobilizing to have sanctions lifted from Saddam which they were about to succeed in doing. President Bush did not have the wit to point this out. It is true, nonetheless. And the U.N., somehow seen as a potential arbiter in Iraq, does not have the courage of well . . . those two young Italian pacifist women who were held hostage by political gangsters even though they were against the American presence. When U.N. headquarters was bombed, Kofi Annan immediately pulled his staff out and they haven't returned. He'll put them back when they are perfectly safe, which is to say when they are not needed.

There is a stifling formalism to Sen. Kerry's conception about how one does diplomacy. He likes summits (three mentions), as if they are not commonly mere stage sets for grandstanding. He also likes special envoys -- James Baker and Jimmy Carter in particular -- as if they were what was needed to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, although he did not mention this hackneyed and failed fixative on Thursday night, failed not only in the Holy Land but in Ireland, too.

Sen. Kerry is allergic to force, as we all should be, at least somewhat. [Note: Mr. Kerry has no problem with the use of force - as long as we only use it against opponents so small and powerless that victory is assured. Mr. Kerry takes Powell Doctrine to the illogical extreme. He supports use of military force to prop up a tin-pan dictator in Haiti but opposes it to remove a sadistic and brutal one in Iraq] But there are times when force is necessary, even unilateral force or force deployed by a small cohort of nations. Sen. Kerry seemed to praise Bush père for the limits he put on the ambitions of the 1991 Gulf War, that it did not target Saddam. But Sen. Kerry -- it is important to recall -- voted even against that war although it was backed by a far larger coalition of countries, many Arab states included.

Mr. Kerry seeks to lull voters into the Democratic sheepfold with the comforting illusion of a soda-pop world in which all nations will once more join hands to share a Coke and a smile. To him, it is more important to achieve consensus than to be in the right. And not just any old consensus will do -- it must be a consensus of the right people. His ability to ignore recent history (and the signals given by both France and Germany) is disturbing:

Still, Sen. Kerry promises that, if he is elected, he will be able to bring both more countries and the U.N. itself into Iraq. And what would be their motivation? To let American divisions out? This is a fantasy, like his fantasy that his found allies would also put up money for the enterprise they and he have railed against.

- Cassandra