I got Kerry’s main point from the debate Thursday wrong. Well, not wrong so much as incomplete. I said his main point was basically “Iraq was a mistake.” But really, this was the foreign policy debate and foreign policy is properly more than just Iraq. And Kerry did articulate a foreign policy that went beyond Iraq. He was clear, focused, and occasionally passionate about it, and all of that contributed to the perception that he won the debate.
But did he lose the election that night as well?
Kerry was vague on details, but he was clear on the principle that he thought we should have made no fundamental changes to our foreign policy in reaction to September 11th. His main points always led back to a basic belief that we should’ve kept doing things like we did before the towers fell.
Kerry said that pre-emptive action in Iraq was wrong, and pre-emption is very much a post-9/11 thing. Kerry said we should’ve patiently worked through the UN for more sanctions, more inspections and more diplomacy. Kerry said we should’ve continued with the policy of keeping Saddam “in his box” that we’d followed through most of the 90’s. Kerry believes Saddam was getting weaker and weaker with time, and that Bush created an artificial sense of urgency about Iraq ("misled" about WMD, no imminent threat, etc). Iraq wasn’t an imminent threat (Bush never claimed it was), and not acting until a threat became imminent is a very pre-9/11 thing.
On North Korea, Kerry was again very clear that the pre-9/11 policy of bilateral talks should have continued, rather than replacing them with the multilateral talks that Bush considers essential.
In Afghanistan, Kerry favored a more traditional invasion, using large numbers of conventional US troops rather than “outsourcing” the job to the Northern Alliance with minimal support from agile US forces - a Rumsfeld notion. Remember that attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 was a relatively uncontroversial thing. There were protests of course, but they were small and the idea of going into Afghanistan had close to 90% support in the US. But retaliating against Afghanistan was entirely consistent with pre-9/11 policy. The Taliban had overtly allied themselves with al Qaeda, and al Qaeda had attacked us, so it was justified by pre-9/11 policy to respond. Osama bin Laden was an uncontroversial enemy to go after, and, by pre-9/11 accepted policy, he and his organization were the only legitimate targets. Every time we hear that Saddam had nothing to do with al Qaeda, we hear the voice of late 20th-Century policy. We were attacked, ergo we can respond, but only against those that attacked us, and all of our effort should be focused on that one clear enemy. President Bush specifically rejected that as insufficient for the new world revealed to us by the smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero, and he looked at Afghanistan as simply the opening salvo against a larger enemy that included, but was not limited to, Osama bin Laden.
On weapons programs, Kerry believes in unilateral disarmament on our part as a prerequisite for asking other nations to abandon their nuclear efforts. This is in dramatic contrast to President Bush’s post-9/11 policy of developing weapons, nuclear or otherwise, for the express purpose of forcibly ending other nation’s dreams of WMDs if they won't give them up voluntarily.
In all these cases, Kerry advocates a return to foreign policy as it existed when the Twin Towers still stood. To Kerry, 9/11 was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of tragedy, the kind of thing that happens even with the best policy and therefore was nothing that signaled a need to change course. To him, and his core supporters, Bush the Cowboy has completely overreacted to 9/11 by turning American foreign policy on it’s ear, and it’s time for calmer, more sophisticated folks to put us back on the old course.
Agree with it or not, it is a mostly coherent foreign policy, and 40-45% of the country believes it completely. But Kerry's problem is that 55-60% of the country thinks 9/11 was not an abberation, but a wake-up call. Kerry didn’t do anything in the debates to convince them otherwise. Instead, he confirmed that, if you do think 9/11 was a wakeup call, Kerry is not your guy.
