Kerry For President?
An Election Like No Other
By Ali Sina
I watched the first round of the presidential
debate between President Bush and Senator Kerry with a lot of
interest. I am not an American but I believe the outcome of this election
will affect not just America
but the entire world. If you don’t accuse me of being hyperbolic I dare
to say that this is the most important election in the history of mankind.
On this election may depend the future of the world and whether there
would be another world war or perhaps it could be avoid. This was one
debate I could not miss.
I have to acknowledge that Sen.
Kerry was better prepared and was more eloquent than President Bush. But
do eloquence and being articulate really equate to wisdom and
statesmanship? Please do not misunderstand me, I am not drawing any
comparison but merely trying to make my point. Hitler was an impressive
orator but of course he was a very wrong person to lead his country.
So with this in mind I put aside
the eloquence factor and tried to understand the message that each one of
these candidates was delivering, peer into their character and appraise
their capability as the commander in chief of the most powerful country in
the history of mankind.
Sen. Kerry said many things
that sounded logical. He said
North Korea
now has nuclear bombs and
Iran
is in pursuit of them and no one is doing anything about it. I agree with
that.
He said that not enough is being
done to buy the uranium-enriched stockpile that the Soviets had developed
and this could fall in the hands of wrong bidders.
I agree with that too.
He said American ports are not
secure. This is true. But in reality terrorists do not need to send their
destructive terror through the ports. There are so many ways they could
hit America
and the rest of the civilized world that only their diabolic imagination
sets the limit. We really can’t protect ourselves everywhere. If you try
to secure the airports by checking the passengers, they could blow themselves
up in the crowded lines while waiting to be checked. They could attack schools,
subways, busses, hospitals, restaurants, water-reservoirs, shopping
malls…, the list is end less. Can we really secure all these places? So
the point is moot. Yes it would be nice to secure the ports but does that
make America
any safer? What if atomic bombs are delivered to various ports and
detonated simultaneously while waiting inspection? What Sen.
Kerry is proposing will only make Americans spend more money for a false
sense of security.
Sen. Kerry also berated his rival and said that the war in Iraq
was a wrong war at a wrong time. Then in that debate he said something
different. He said that he agreed with the war but he would have fought it
differently. In other words it wasn’t the wrong war at a wrong time but
a war that was fought in a wrong way. The Senator however did not go into
specifics to explain in what ways he would have fought this war
differently. I wanted to know, and a google search brought me the answer:
The following is part of an interview that Sen. Kerry gave in 1998:
"Saddam Hussein is pursuing a
program to build weapons of mass destruction and I support regime change,
with ground troops if necessary. I am way ahead of the
commander in chief, and I’m probably way ahead of my colleagues and
certainly of much of the country.” (1)
It is
clear that Sen. Kerry realized the danger that Saddam was posing and he
wanted to remove him by sending ground troops to Iraq way before 9/11.
Isn’t this exactly what the President did? So in what ways
Sen. Kerry would have fought this war
differently?
In 2002 he reiterated his concern
about the Iraqi dictator and warned, “he
may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to
invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States”. (1)
But what we heard in this debate
was completely a different story. The Senator said "Let me be as blunt and
direct with the American people as I can be; the invasion of Iraq was a
profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy -- al Qaeda."
Are we to understand that in previous
occasions when the Senator made the above statements he was not blunt and
direct with the Americans?
It seems that Sen. Kerry's bone of
contention with the President is that he acted alone without involving
other countries in the process. In other words the Senator wants
to be a team player and make sure that everyone is happy. How noble! But
again we remember him saying that if push comes to shove he would act
alone even if the UN Security Council fails to act.
2003 - "If Saddam Hussein
is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing
order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is
mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the
Security Council fails to act."(1)
Wasn't this exactly what the
President did? So I can't understand why the Senator is attacking the
president for doing exactly what he [Sen. Kerry] said should be
done.
In this debate, Sen. Kerry also
said a lot of things that are clichés, like “reaching out to Muslims.”
What does reaching out to Muslims mean? Is that a new term for
appeasement? How does he plan to do that? Build more Mosques in America? Give more special rights to Muslims? Make more compromises? Or perhaps
offer them Israel
as the sacrificial lamb?
He said that he wants to enlist
the support of all other countries in the fight against terrorism. What if
other countries do not want to come aboard? Would he sit on his hands and
wait until the terrorists become stronger? The Europeans have totally
different priorities. All they care for is to sign lucrative trade
agreements with the rogue states. Terrorism and the stability of the world
is the last thing in their minds. This is to them an American problem.
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