Kerry = Carter III

Yes, I've been banging this drum for months and maybe Kerry's appeasement at all costs speech yesterday should support more of a Kerry = McGovern line, but the fact is that Kerry's preposterous declarations show that the spirit of Jimmy Carter is alive and well in the Democratic party.

Kerry said that he would not have removed Saddam from power. Therefore, Kerry would never have been able to ensure that Iraq would comply with the 16 existing resolutions against it at the time of the US invasion in 2003 (all of which were violated). Why? Because Saddam was the root of the problem in Iraq, thus Kerry wanted no solution. Saying that Iraq is worse without Saddam is the functional equivalent of Carter's laudatory words for such luminaries as Brezhnev, Ceausescu, Ortega, Castro, Chavez and Kim Jong-Il.

Moreover, Kerry claims that Iraq was not a terrorist magnet before the war, now it is. There are two responses to this: (1) Zarqawi fled to Iraq from Afghanistan (and gained Saddam's succor) after the Taliban was overthrown, combine that with Iraq's housing of Abu Nidal and its $25k rewards for Palestinian suicide bombers and Kerry's claim is completely rubbished; (2) Iraq as a terrorist magnet is a GOOD THING because the more who go there openly (or in identifiable clumps, even if they try to remain secret), the fewer we need to worry about in the rest of the world and the more convenient they are for killing. Kerry does not understand that the point of finding terrorists in Iraq is to kill them. Period.

Finally, this UN fetishism and "Iraq is the world's responsibility" is rank idiocy. After the past three years of French perfidy, UN dawdling, Oil-for-Food scandal, Syria and Libya on the UN Human Rights Commission, Darfur, and vacillation in the face of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the notion that the UN can or will do ANYTHING of substance or utility that is morally good and operationally difficult is pure fantasy, and anyone who believes it has lost his/her grip on reality.