Kerry’s Radicalism Uncontested By Ivan Kenneally
Senator John Kerry’s confirmation as the next Secretary of State was all but uncontested, a quiet and bloodless affair. This is unusual because Kerry’s bid for the presidency in 2004 was unsuccessful largely because his foreign policy views were rejected as unpalatable by the American public. So what the American people refused to democratically affirm in an hotly disputed election was uncontroversially embraced by the Senate. The Left has discovered that when one door closes, another opens.
And what was so unsettling about Kerry’s views then? A lot of the antipathy was generated by his insistence on a “global test” instituted by the UN to supervise American foreign policy. Outsourcing our sovereignty to an organization whose Human Rights council has included Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and Jordan struck many Americans as somewhere on the spectrum between unwise and insane. Has Kerry recanted these views? It’s hard to know since no senator, Democrat or Republican, saw fit to ask him during the confirmation hearing.
Kerry also proved to be either indecisive or opportunistic when it came to important matters of principle. So while he was staunch supporter of the Iraq war when it came up for congressional vote he became an intransigent opponent of it when its popularity sagged and he sought the presidency. Likewise, he was an enthusiastic cheerleader of the Patriot Act, even helping to write the legislation, until it became politically convenient to indignantly deride it.
And Kerry’s most recent judgement calls have not been any more confidence inspiring. Last February he announced to Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria and that any Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations should include the establishment of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. He has repeatedly opposed classifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. Also, he has been an unabashed supporter of Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad, fawningly referring to him not only as “generous” but as “my dear friend”. After what he described as a “very positive discussion” with Assad, Kerry walked way impressed that he would become an important reformer, a “man who wants to change”, and that Syria at large could be integral to bringing peace to the Middle East.
Maybe this extraordinary lapse in prudence struck the Senate as unspectacular because the outgoing Secretary of State echoed Kerry’s delusions: “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties have gone to Syria in recent months and have said they believe he a reformer”. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was among those gushing: “..the road to Damascus is the road to peace”.
Again, these issues might have made for an edifying discussion if anyone in the Senate saw fit to raise them.
And these are concerns that have only recently emerged. A more searching investigation of Kerry’s qualifications might scrutinize his association with the Vietnam Veterans Against War in the early 1970’s. This was an group on the far fringes of the respectable left that considered themselves revolutionary communists, carried placards in support of China, the Soviet Union, Viet Nam, and Cuba and routinely assembled demonstrations where the American flag was desecrated and the US government was denounced. Kerry’s testimony was so unremittingly anti-American it was reportedly used to demoralize our prisoners of war in Viet Nam.
It is a disconcerting testament to congressional complacency that Kerry’s controversial record on foreign policy went unremarked upon during a hearing intended to gauge his suitability for the top foreign policy post in the nation. President Obama dismissed public opinion by choosing him in the first place but it was Congress that abjured their obligations to represent the American people by letting him get away with it.
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Ivan Kenneally is Editor in Chief of the Daily Witness.
Category: Featured, International
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Where is Hillary Clinton’s 2011 Muslim Spring and John Kerry’s Senate intervention regarding the Egyptian Aid $1.5 Billion foreign aid package? (Sixteen F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1A1 main battle tanks)
Why didn’t our Senate ask these questions at Senator Kerry’s confirmation hearings this week ????
(94 Yeas, 3 Nays???) Must be a moot point or a support your own Senate member… regardless of the facts!
Kerry’s Vietnam experience disillusioned him about the war. If he was so disillusioned by the War, why did he sign up for a second tour????
When he returned to the U.S., he became a founder of Vietnam Veterans of America and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, becoming its national coordinator. In 1971, at age 27, he organized a protest march of about a thousand Vietnam veterans in Washington, during which he gave an impassioned speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
(How many of these protesting veterans were draftee’s???)
Note: 58,169 were killed and 304,000 wounded out of 2.59 million who served in Vietnam itself. 3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore)
He eloquently questioned the motives for the war: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Read more: John Forbes Kerry — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921192.html#ixzz2JTBGJVRt
Remember Kerry’s fabrications and embellishments about Viet Nam atrocities, (discredited by his own unit!) his padded service record and statement that Marines leave their dead on the battlefield? How can we, the citizens of the United States, trust him 42 years later as our chief foreign diplomat?
I’m sure the attack on America and the US Libyan Ambassador and Navy SEALS at Benghazi who died on the 9/11 anniversary, would like him to answer his 1971 Senate testimony question , “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Maybe Hillary Clinton, a fellow Yale graduate, has already answered his question with her recent testimony, “What difference does it make?”
Obviously, neither of these individuals will ever understand a Marine Corps creed, “Death before Dishonor!”
I know, I was there too…..