The Big Lie About Iraq

Tacitus has written at great length about the real Kerry plan in Iraq, and has come to the conclusion that what Kerry really intends to do is to cut and run.

Tacitus makes a persuasive case, and Kerry to date has publicly offered little more than a Nixonian deal with the devil. “Trust me,” he in effect says. “I will release my plan after I have been elected.” This did not impress the editors at USA Today, who stated today:

Thirty-six years ago, Republican candidate Richard Nixon made a similar pitch for ending the Vietnam War: He slammed the Democrats as incompetent, called on allies to bear more of the burden and suggested that he had a plan to end the war that he couldn’t disclose until he was in office.

Four years later, he still had no answer.

Iraq isn’t Vietnam, and Kerry’s plan isn’t quite as opaque as Nixon’s, but the historical echoes are strong enough to suggest that if Kerry has a credible proposal for Iraq, he needs to fill in the blanks.

As Tacitus stated earlier, Kerry’s only real stated plan is to ‘internationalize’ the War, whatever that means. In case you are unconvinced by Tacitus’s piece, you need only use google to check for Kerry’s public proclamations:

John Kerry and John Edwards will make the creation of a stable and secure environment in Iraq our immediate priority in order to lay the foundations for sustainable democracy. They will:

Persuade NATO to Make the Security of Iraq one of its Global Missions and to deploy a significant portion of the force needed to secure and win the peace in Iraq. NATO participation will in turn open the door to greater international involvement from non-NATO countries. – Kerry/Edwards Website

Kerry said he has laid out several steps that should be taken to increase international involvement in Iraq, including sitting down and talking “in a very personal way” with leaders of other countries, sharing decision-making and reconstruction there and getting together the United Nations, NATO or another “group of international players” to recognize its “global responsibility.” He said he would get a U.N. resolution authorizing action in Iraq.

“Statesmanship and leadership are the art of persuading people who might otherwise have reservations of their interests,” he said. – Fox News, 16 May 2004

First, he said, the other members of the United Nations Security Council should be brought in “to share the political and military responsibilities and burdens of Iraq with the United States.”

The coalition should endorse the transition plan of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Kerry said, and a high commissioner should be appointed. Finally, he added, NATO must contribute forces and “take on an organizing role.” – Military.Com, 1 May, 2004

Kerry beat the drum on multilateralism. “American soldiers are bearing the huge majority, the lion’s share of the risk in Iraq. It doesn’t have to be that way, it never had to be that way,” he said. It was a stance he repeated Friday.

“The immediate goal is to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share the risk and reduce the burden of our own forces,” he said. “That is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation.” – Washington Times, 3 May 2004

Kerry’s message is clear- he wants to ‘internationalize’ the war in Iraq, a statement so vapid and vacuous that were the roles been reversed and it was George Bush running to unseat John Kerry uttering these inanities, the chattering classes would have another round of ‘Bush is stupid’ jokes circulating the DNC by mid-morning.

The roles, however,are not reversed, and the press has continuously failed to ask the hard questions, such as:

“As President, Mr. Kerry, why do you think you will be able to place more international troops on he ground?”

“Have any countries promised to provide more support if you are elected?”

“What countries have troops that are available for deployment?”

“Are those troops modernized and professional enough to work effectively besides British, Australian, and American forces?”

If he were to be asked those questions, the ruse would immediately be over, and Mr. Kerry would immediately be exposed as the fraud that he is. IN fact, honest responses to those questions would be so devestating that the Kerry/Edwards campaign and the DNC would immediately have to threaten to sue news stations to keep them from airing his response.

There simply is no international will to become involved in Iraq beyond what has already been contributed. Germany and France, our recalcitrant allies, have stated over and over again that they will not provide any troops- in fact, it took months of negotiation to even persuade France to allow a NATO training mission in Iraq to move forward. Kerry is, to be blunt, lying:

“I understand why John Kerry is making proposals of this kind, but there is a lack of realism in them,” Menzies Campbell, a British lawmaker who is a spokesman on defense issues for the Liberal Democratic Party, said in a typical comment.

Many allied countries may welcome a new team in Washington after years of friction with the Bush administration. But foreign leaders are making it clear they don’t want to add enough of their own troops to allow U.S. forces to scale back to a minority share in Iraq, as Kerry has proposed.

Allies say they are ready to consider further financial aid and other help for the fragile new Iraqi government. But some officials overseas already are fretting about Kerry’s talk of burden-shifting.

“Some Europeans are rather concerned that Mr. Kerry might have expectations for relief [from abroad] that are going to be hard to meet,” said one senior European diplomat in a statement echoed in several capitals.

In an interview with The Times last week, Kerry said that by building up international support, it would be a “reasonable goal” to replace most U.S. troops in Iraq with foreign forces within his first term. There are now about 140,000 U.S. troops stationed there, or 88% of a total international force of about 160,000.

Not only is there no international will, there are simply no forces to deploy in the first place:

Some key countries have already ruled out providing troops, and others are badly strained from the deployments they have already made.

The French and German governments have made clear that sending troops is out of the question. British officials have made no such categorical statement, but they have expressed concern that their troops are overstretched.

Although Japan has supplied a 550-member noncombat force as a symbol of its international commitment, analysts there see little chance the nation would agree to send more.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrei Denisov, ruled out a commitment of troops. “We are not going to send anybody there, and that’s all there is to say,” Denisov said.

“From the major European countries, there’s simply not a lot of available troops out there, for both practical and political reasons,” said Christopher Makins, president of the Atlantic Council of the United States, which supports U.S. engagement abroad.

In summary, Kerry has no plan available forpublic scrutiny, and what can be pieced together from his public statements is untenable. Why are you only reading about that here?