Petrified Truth

Prudence

Empty-headed Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift wonders why John Kerry is "silent" about the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

If ever there was a moment for John Kerry to come out swinging, this is it. It is the biggest story of the war, and he is essentially silent. The independent voters who will decide this election want someone who is bold, decisive and a leader. They want someone like John McCain, who even though he wears a Republican team shirt has been candid and blunt in assessing the fallout from this and other Bush fiascos.

Here’s where Kerry’s vaunted caution comes into play. He held a press conference Wednesday in Los Angeles where he voiced boilerplate outrage and accused the administration of being “slow and inappropriate” in its response. He did call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, but he’s done that before. This is the language of a diplomat when the situation requires a warrior.

She blames it on his intellectual qualities.

Kerry’s decision-making style is that he calls a lot of people for advice rather than just go with his gut. Surely his instinct as a Vietnam vet must be to come out swinging with both fists. But he’s getting conflicting advice, and his tendency is to keep consulting and defer a decision.

Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic gets closer to the truth. As with everything about John Kerry, it's all about Vietnam.

The most confused response comes, however, from John Kerry. On the one hand, the candidate faults "some American troops [who] under some circumstance have engaged in behavior that ... is absolutely unacceptable." On the other, he assures that "if I were president, we'd have a very different set of activities going on in Iraq today"--the none-too-subtle implication being that the abuses amount to an authentic expression of American policy.

Politically and morally, Kerry is treading a very thin line here. For political reasons, the candidate has yet to declare the obvious--that the soldiers in question have committed war crimes and that, whatever official policy may be, there simply can be no extenuation on this count.

To understand Kerry's reluctance to focus on the guards, we would do well to cast a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time the public has responded to a wartime revelation of this scope. Having been convicted in 1971 of premeditated murder during the My Lai massacre of 1968, Lieutenant William Calley became an overnight hero.

As it happens, one of the voices raised in Calley's defense belonged to John Kerry. The responsibility for My Lai, Kerry said in congressional testimony, rested not with Calley, but "with the men who designed free fire zones ... with the men who encourage body counts." Lest anyone miss the point, Kerry told an audience at the New York Stock Exchange, "Guilty as Lt. Calley might have been of the actual murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal. Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America."

Kerry's insistence that none of this would have transpired "if I were president" blames the mission that filled Abu Ghraib with prisoners as much as it blames the soldiers who betrayed that mission. Again, this makes perfect political sense. But it hardly provides an adequate response to the moral questions raised at Abu Ghraib.

Kerry does have now an Internet petition calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, but as of this moment, his home page features education and Cinco de Mayo more prominently than anything about Iraq.

Kerry opponents at CrushKerry.com believe that Senate Democrats "went pretty easy" on Rumsfeld yesterday, and they have sources who say they know why.

The photos of those alleged cases of abuse have enraged the Arab world. And Democrat bigs on the Armed Services Committee have called for Rumsfled’s head.

But according to our source inside the Kerry campaign, John Kerry badly wants the issue to go away. Kerry fears the longer the issue stays in the news, the greater the likelihood his controversial accusations of war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam – including his own – will become an ancillary issue in the campaign for President. “The 9-11 Commission is already going to discredit Bush in their report. If we push things too far, there is bound to be a backlash,” our source told us. “Tonight’s cable news talk shows were proof. Virtually every one of them ran footage of John Kerry in 1971 trashing his fellow veterans and admitting atrocities.”

Our source told us that the Democrat Senate Caucus had originally planned to “rake Rumsfeld over the coals” at today’s hearing, but that Kerry wanted them to tone it down. Kerry had heated phone conversations with at least two key Democrats on the Armed Services Committee, demanding to know of one, “Why are you trying to f—k me on this?”

Tip via EconoPundit

Oddly, despite his intellectualism, Kerry's not-so-nuanced negotiating technique (“Why are you trying to f—k me on this?”) is probably remarkably similar to what President Bush had to say to our "allies" Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroder just last year. Must be a Skull & Bones thing. Those crazy Yalies.

Posted by Alan at May 8, 2004 08:29 AM