Recall then Lt. Kerry’s words before the 1971 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly:Insert the words “Iraq,” “terrorism” and “terrorists” for “Vietnam,” “communism” and “communists” into this segment of the testimony and this could have been part of a Kerry speech from last week.
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.
Senator Kerry’s views on deployment of US Forces in combat seem not to have changed from their 1971 state. At last, something on which the senator hasn’t done the “flip-flop.”
So we should admit that Iraq was a mistake and pull out, using the Vietnam example, because we can’t fight terrorism all over the world, right Senator? Or perhaps we should go back (again) and beg our “real” allies to help us out. The problem with that, Senator, is that just today, France and Germany told you to kiss their collective rosy-reds (apparently the job you’re doing at present in that area isn’t quite up to par). They won’t send troops into Iraq whether George W. Bush asks them to or you do (not even under the NATO banner).
So now whatchu gon’ do?
*****
I have wondered here (humorously) how much contact Senator Kerry has had with military personnel between his discharge from the Navy Reserves and the onset of his campaign for president. Little to none is the probable answer and even if that answer is wrong, one wonders whether the senator asked any substantive questions about service other than comparing an individual member’s medals and/or ribbons to his own. In spite of the facts of his own service, the senator seems to understand little about how most military personnel view being sent into combat.
If Kerry wanted to demoralize our forces, he would say little that's different from what he is saying now. As he continues to tack with the breeze, it's clear that there is no underlying principle that guides him, no resolve in his mind that the lives lost should not have been in vain. Kerry's message does not promise the men and women who are risking their lives that their sacrifices will buy anything different from what dozens of lives bought in Somalia [nothing except for Osama bin Laden’s escalation of the scope of his attack, culminating in 9/11]. Instead, Kerry says that we want to turn Iraq over to others, and bug out. Our troops' morale — as best I can gauge it — is not down. They're not happy about doing what they're committed to do: No one wants to fight or suffer or die. But their morale depends on the resolve and commitment of their commander in chief, and the bond of trust between them and the president. If their morale isn't down yet, it will sink more and more as they think about what Kerry would do as president. They know he will not finish the job.If the job is abandoned as the fruits of a colossal error, those thousand men and women will indeed collectively become “the last man [sic] to die for a mistake” by the hand of the man who will be chosen to be president this year, which ever man that is.
(Thanks to LGF)
