For the record, I voted for Kerry. I wasn't thrilled with the man, but I thought he was a far better choice for president than Bush. I really, really, really wish he had won the election, and the fact that I have lost a great deal of respect for Kerry since then should not be taken in any way, shape, or form as implying that I am supporting Bush in any way, shape, or form.
Since the election, I have been steadily losing respect for Kerry. I donated a small amount of money to his campaign, and as a result, I am on an email list for direct email from him. The fact that he lost has not discouraged him from sending repeated emails out to this list in recent months. For some reason, the emails since the election seem to be pushing views that are a bit to the left of where he was when he was running. More and more, he strikes me as a politician in the mold of the legendary French radical who saw the crowd go by and said, "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so that I can lead them."
Of course, that description fits damn near every politician in the country right now.
Today, I got an email from Kerry that put out a proposal that really made me wonder what the man is smoking. He is proposing, and asking people to sign a petition supporting, a "plan" in which 20,000 US troops are withdrawn from Iraq following the December elections there. I don't care what side of the debate you are on when it comes to troops in Iraq. That plan is not only stupid, it is downright dangerous, and the man should know better.
The "premise" of the plan appears to be that elections in Iraq make things better when it comes to dealing with the insurgency. Personally, I think that the insurgents have done a reasonably good job of disproving that. They are more active some months than others, but there doesn't seem to have been any long-term trend toward a drop in their activity since the last elections there. Elections per se do very little to help the immediate security situation (the long term effects may be different, but that is yet to be seen). Using the election as a reason to pull out a limited number of troops makes no sense at all.
That's why the idea is stupid. It's also dangerous. In fact, it's even more dangerous than pulling out all of our troops. If we do that, I personally feel that we will be immorally reneging on the responsibility that we have to leave Iraq no worse off than when we started. However, American troops will no longer be at risk under that plan. Under the Kerry proposal, we will be left with a security situation that is probably no better than it was when we pulled out the 20,000 troops, but there will be fewer Americans on the ground. This, in turn, will place the troops that remain at an even more elevated level of risk than they are now.
Kerry, being both a veteran and a man who aspired to be Commander-in-Chief, should know better.
3 comments:
I think 20,000 troops is too low. We need to bring a whole lot more home than that. Or actually, just bring my brother home. You can keep everyone else over there
Having been a Kerry supporter in 2004, I too was receiving frequent emails from his office, usually promoting another effort to collect thousands of supporters' names to deliver to those with whom he's at issue this week. But there were also those requests for contributions so JFK could tilt at his latest windmill. It became tiresome.
Asking to remove or unsubscribe one's name and email address seems to be the best response. I hope the Kerry people would notice.
Kerry's no longer running for President--at least not until the presidential primary season heats up again in 2007. So whatever he's saying now should be read in the light of the fact that he's another senator trying to keep his name in the spotlight.
(Good God, you should see some of the occasional newsletters I get from my homestate senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran.)
As for criticizing Kerry's 'plan', two things:
1. Yes, pulling out small numbers of troops could lead to greater danger to those remaining, but this is by no means for certain. Most likely, what we'll be doing in prep for division disengagement is reducing the types of work that expose our troops to insurgency effects. The most likely effect of this? Greater numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians dead. Fewer American soldiers dead.
2. We've already been hearing about troop pullout plans before you got Kerry's Christmas letter. Congressional mid-terms are coming up in 2006. Already you've heard talk from incumbents (both Republicans and Democrats) going to their home districts and coming back to talk about reduced numbers of troops in Iraq by 2006. Hell, we started hearing about this right after the 2004 elections were over.
Yes, this is politics. No, that doesn't make it less likely to happen.
So in the end, I believe that we will see a troop drawdown in mid-2006 before the elections. Short of a double-scale insurgent effort to keep them in-country, I don't see another politically expedient solution on the horizon. (Of course, that doesn't make it morally expedient [isn't that a contradiction in terms?])
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