Kerry and Vietnam - Still His Defining Moment

Glancing around the blogosphere, I looked up one of my favorite sites and found some one else doing what I did. Not looking at the SBVT and Kerry's medals as the defining "Vietnam" issue, but looking at him and his actions directly after Vietnam and how, even according to Kerry, they define the man and what that will mean for US policy in the next four years if he is elected.

This by Belgravia Dispatch

Kerry testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

Senator, I will say this. I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in other it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

Hello...This is the same guy who later personally negotiated with the Communist leadership of North Vietnam and brought it back to the Senate; tried to broker a deal with the USSR backed Ortega government in Nicaragua; opposed Reagan's confrontation of the Soviet Union; opposed Gulf War I to oust Saddam out of Kuwait (a strategic area both militarily and economically as well as an ally); opposed using force to stop the genocide in the Serbia/Bosnia conflict; and finally, technically opposed Gulf War II to oust the nasty dictator Saddam and insure that he cannot support the terrorists we are fighting even though he voted for it when it seemed that it was going to be the popular vote, "nuancing" his stand by insisting that it can only go forward with a "multilateral" consensus.

Basically, his approach is to let people live under whatever condition, no matter how vile, so long as the US does not get involved. Belgravia says it best in discussing Kerry's opposition to even the NATO interference in the Balkans:

Why, one wonders? Wouldn't a liberal Senator from Massachusetts want to help victims of genocidal policies? Because I think, to his core, Kerry's Vietnam experience has left him highly suspicious of the use of American power. He appears to think it an overly blunt instrument that, more often than not, causes more harm than good on the world stage. So, therefore, a policy of authorizing NATO warplanes into flight to protect civilians being shelled to death becomes cause for deep suspicion. Put differently, how could a military adventure by the Americans be for a good cause? (Note also, and perhaps this is strange for the son of a diplomat, that one espies isolationist tendencies within Kerry too).

Isolationist..That says it all. This is what I have been saying all along. It's not his service in Vietnam. It's not his medals. It's the thing that he learned about Vietnam and has driven him ever since. It's the thing that will drive his policy in Iraq. He has already indicated, without giving expectations of actual achievements before doing so, that he will bring home 3/4 of the troops within 6 mos of taking office. That's his words, not mine. That means he doesn't give a damn about the condition of Iraq, just that we are no longer involved there. Insuring that there is no "last soldier to die" for the cause.

By the way, a cause to insure that a dangerous dictator no longer has the means to threaten the region and the world. A cause to insure that a dangerous man can no longer hold a populace hostage like the worst of Stalinist dictators. How do we know? The guy insisted that we abandon our anti-communist allies in Nicaragua. Insisted that we leave the ME to sort itself out even though that means the whole world economy and security could go to hell. He learned this from Vietnam:

Mr. Kerry: Well, Senator, this obviously is the most difficult question of all, but I think that at this point the United States is not really in a position to consider the happiness of those people as pertains to the army in our withdrawal. We have to consider the happiness of the people as pertains to the life which they will be able to lead in the next few years.

Yo! Mr. Kerry...Do you know what happened to the South Vietnamese we left behind? Abandoned? You got a clue one about the type of life they live now? Peaceful, huh? Nice and peaceful under a Communist regime that, for the last 30 years, has "disappeared" people; interned them in "re-education" camps; has a crappy, backwater economy; has people dying of curable diseases...I could go on.

This is his idea of American altruism? Live and let live? Excellent idea. We'll just sit over here in our comfortable homes and booming economy while the rest of the world goes to hell and hope that it doesn't boomerang on us.

What's that? It already has? We sat on our asses for 30 some years and let the ME do what it would and guess what it got us? 3000 dead. Count them.

The ME will only change with economic growth and freedom. That's a fact. Another fact is that Socialist/Stalinist/Autocratic governments do not create, support, nor desire economic growth and freedom because it threatens their power. The only way this will occur is by first destroying the biggest hindrance to this development. This hindrance is not the US foreign policy, contrary to popular belief. The hindrance is the despotic governments themselves.

So..This is what we must fear from a Kerry White House. Isolationist policies that will not make us safe. At the most, it will only delay the inevitable.

Someone on a blog recently asked me how I can support creating freedom and destroying hatred by dropping bombs. Isn't this just creating the hatred?

My answer is this: don't be simple. The first step is destroying the regimes that oppress people. That might include killing the people that support that despotic regime. How else are we going to free these folks? Pray for peace? Ask the despotic tyrants, nicely, to please, please, please, let their people go?

Even Moses visited some nasty plagues on the Egyptians before they freed the Israelites.

Unlike Sen. Kerry, I'm not willing to sacrifice the dreams and lives of people to despotic regimes for a few moments of peace. I would much rather that we have war and free one country after the other, sacrificing the lives of a few people to insure that the world at large is safer, FREE and prosperous. That includes me, either as a sacrifice for that freedom or living it with millions of newly anointed free men and women.

I don't see this struggle as some US hegemony or power trip. I see this as near the struggle of our own civil war. A war that was meant to save the union and preserve our national security that ultimately freed the slaves of a horrible economic policy. That's what we must see when we look out at the world. Not just one country or two that might harbor our enemies, but whole places full of slaves that are daily crushed beneath the boot of despots. A place where hatred and blood oaths are created. Where we are seen as the oppressors.

We must not be the oppressors. We must be the liberators. Only in the liberation of our fellow man can we be safe. Can we claim the high moral ground.

It is not moral to sit on the side lines and hope that people are just able to "live" under one type of regime or another, regardless of it's name. That is not living. Living is freedom to pursue happiness, prosperity and a better future. Living is not praying that you are not the one they come for today. We are not safe while men and women live in conditions that we wouldn't wish on our dogs.

This is what Sen. Kerry advocates. I will have none of it.

Once upon a time, there was a man named John Brown. People called him a fanatic. He believed in God. He believed that all men should be free. He smuggled men and women of color to "free" states. He advocated armed interdiction against slavers and slave holders. People called him crazy. He was killed by the same country that later did violent conflict over the same issue. He was not wrong, just ahead of his time.

Are we ahead of our time? Probably. The question will remain: do we sit here and wait for the next group of folks to attack us or do we go out and free the slaves now? If the enemy, those wanting to create the "New Caliphate" are able to win this round of the war, they will enslave these people for decades to come and eventually become a power like the USSR or Nazi Germany that will seek to confront the west and become THE power in the world. We cannot let this evil be created and we cannot allow people to continue in their slavery, powerless to stop this new evil from taking over their lives and destroying ours.

"Give us your tired, your hungry, your poor, your masses yearning to be free."

Let us not just take from this world. Let us give back the greatest gift man can give to another. In doing so, we will be more free, more safe than we have ever been in this lifetime.