| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| richfed |
Posted - April 21 2004 : 05:08:00 AM
The Boston Fog Machine
By DAVID BROOKS
The 1990's were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were
gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.
Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce
through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The (first) gulf
war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. "There
are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong" in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, "There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing."
For you see, Kerry continued, "Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the
authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to
whether or not force should be used."
In laying out the Kerry Doctrine - that in voting on a use-of-force
resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the
correct answer is also the correct answer - Kerry was venturing off into
the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark
so many of his major foreign policy statements.
The next crisis occurred in Somalia. Again, the U.S. Senate faced what
appeared to lesser minds as a clear choice: to withdraw in the wake of
U.S. casualties or not to withdraw. The oxymoronically gifted junior
senator from Massachusetts perceived an equivocation between the
modalities: "The choice for the United States of America is not between
two alternatives only: staying in or getting out. There are many other
choices in-between which better reflect the aspirations and hopes of our
country."
Kerry backed a policy of interventionist withdrawal, which jibed with the
"third way" option embraced by President Bill Clinton himself. As Kerry
noted, "I think that the president today made the right decision to try to
establish a process which will maintain the capacity of our forces,
protect them, and to disengage while simultaneously upholding the mission we have set out to accomplish."
The Balkan crisis emerged, and again the Congress seemed to face a tough decision, whether to authorize the use of American force. But then the Boston Fog Machine rolled in: "It is important to remember that this
resolution does not authorize the use of American ground troops in Bosnia, nor does it specifically authorize the use of air or naval power. It
simply associates the U.S. Senate with the current policies of this
administration and of the Security Council." The vote, Kerry concluded,
was over whether to associate with a process that would determine certain necessary conditions involving uncertain modalities, which must be explored, in order to reach certain desirable ends.
The Iraq problem returned in 1998, and Kerry proved again that there is no world crisis so grave it can't be addressed with a fusillade of
subordinate clauses. Teams of highly trained spelunkers have descended
into the darkness of the floor speech he gave on Oct. 10, 1998, searching
for meaning, though none have returned alive.
In a characteristic sentence, which admittedly sounds better in the
original French, Kerry exclaimed: "We know from our largely unsuccessful
attempts to enlist the cooperation of other nations, especially
industrialized trading nations, in efforts to impose and enforce somewhat
more ambitious standards on nations such as Iran, China, Burma and Syria, that the willingness of most other nations - including a number who are joined in the sanctions to isolate Iraq - is neither wide nor deep to |
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| Chris |
Posted - April 21 2004 : 11:21:08 AM
I think this year I am just going to hide under the bed and pray on election day. For once, I guess there is something to be said for living in a state where the election is decided before our votes are ever counted! What a choice!
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