A KERRY I COULD VOTE FOR


Barring an unprecented comeback by John Edwards (who I plan to vote for on Super Tuesday in the New York primary), I am rapidly approaching my first ever experience as a swing voter in an presidential election. Thomas Friedman, however, has stepped into to address what should be serious concerns by liberal hawks everywhere about John Kerry's commitment to win the war in Iraq by creating an idealized version of the likely Democratic nominee. Here's what Friedman's "John Kerry" would say about the war in Iraq in his Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert.

"Tim, before I answer that question, I first want to direct a message to the die-hard Baathists and Islamo-fascists who've been slaughtering Iraqis struggling to build their first democratic government. And my message to these terrorists is this: `READ MY LIPS — if I am president, I will not cut and run. I will not pull our troops out in the face of your intimidation the way Ronald Reagan fled from Lebanon.' Because that panicky retreat from Beirut in 1984 started us down this whole path, where terrorists believed if they hit us hard enough, we would run and they would get away with it. I hate how George Bush has prosecuted this war. I know I could do better. But I want every suicide bomber — from Bali to Baghdad — to understand one thing about a Kerry administration: `You can blow yourselves up from now until next Ramadan, but we'll still be in Iraq. You'll be dead, but we'll still be there. Which part of that sentence don't you understand?'.....

"Tim, I am no dreamer. I've seen a quagmire close up. We can't want a unified, decent Iraq more than the Iraqis themselves. Ultimately, they will have to step up and come together around a plan and a leader. But the terrorists should have no illusions, and the Iraqi people should have no fears: America under John Kerry will give them every chance to succeed. We will not run."

I've never heard this "John Kerry," but he'd get my vote for president. I have however, heard the real John Kerry speak on Iraq, and it has almost universally been rambling soliloquys that are backward-looking parsings of the senator's vote for a war he never really supported. Tom Friedman can write all the Wilsonian speeches for John Kerry he wants - but it doesn't change the fact that the likely Democratic nominee is a Jeffersonian, who will instinctively seek for America's foreign policy to conform to the rest of the world's precisely at a moment when the world needs America's unique vision.