10 April 2004  
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FEATURES
If it’s war you want, vote Kerry
 John Laughland shows that the Democratic contender is more hawkish than Bush, and may appeal to the neocons this November As the Bush administration comes under increasing fire for its decision to attack Iraq, the Democratic contender, John F. Kerry, is profiting from his perceived status as a critic of Bush’s foreign policy. A patrician grandee with a pleasing mix of liberal and patriotic views might seem to many Americans a welcome relief from the bellicose Texan with his faux swagger and his team of men who seem to have ‘military-industrial complex’ written across their menacing foreheads. But if anti-war Americans do elect Kerry for that reason, they will have duped themselves. Warmongering will be worse under Kerry than under Bush, and real peaceniks should therefore vote for Dubya.


Bush and Kerry agree on almost everything in foreign policy, but where they disagree, Kerry is more hawkish. In an indication of the extent of the militarisation of American political life, John Kerry launched his campaign for the presidency specifically by profiling himself as a Vietnam war hero, and by presenting George Bush as a draft-dodger and a coward. Kerry’s subsequent statements on foreign policy and homeland security have continued to attack Bush as a wet. Kerry said in February, ‘I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror. I believe he’s done too little.’

Kerry has committed himself to ‘a stronger, more comprehensive strategy for winning the war on terror than the Bush administration has ever envisioned’ (my italics throughout). Those Americans who are uncomfortable with George Bush’s Patriot Act, and the Department of Homeland Security, should blanch at John Kerry’s proposals to enlist the National Guard in Homeland Security and to ‘break down the old barriers between national intelligence and local law enforcement’. Such barriers are precisely what distinguish free societies from dictatorships. Kerry seems even more obsessed than Bush with weapons of mass destruction, as he is constantly harping on about the danger of WMD being delivered through American ports.

Kerry voted for the war on Iraq and continues to support it wholeheartedly. He said last December that those who continue to oppose the war ‘don’t have the judgment to be president — or the credibility to be elected president’. Kerry does not even say that Bush has jeopardised US security by attacking Iraq instead of facing down the al-Qa’eda threat: he is not Richard Clarke. Instead, Kerry says, ‘No one can doubt that we are safer — and Iraq is better — because Saddam Hussein is now behind bars.’ On 17 December last year, Kerry lent credence to the loony theory that Iraq was the author of the 9/11 attacks, something George Bush has done at least twice. Yet in February, Kerry attacked Bush for planning to hand back power to the Iraqis too quickly — what he called ‘a cut and run strategy’ — even though Bush intends the US embassy in Iraq to be the biggest American embassy in the world, and even though some 110,000 US troops are to remain stationed there indefinitely.

Above all, John Kerry is, like Bush, committed to the world military supremacy of the USA. ‘We must never retreat from having the strongest military in the world,’ says the possible future president. Kerry claims that George Bush has actually ‘weakened’ the military, and so he has promised 40,000 more active-duty army troops. Indeed, Kerry, who drum-beats his ‘readiness to order direct military action’ whenever necessary, has gone so far as to imply that friendly countries might need to be attacked in the war on terror. In February he said, ‘We can’t wipe out terrorist cells in places like Sweden, Canada, Spain, the Philippines or Italy just by dropping in Green Berets.’

John Kerry has tried to give off a reassuringly multilateralist aura, and he says Bush has alienated America’s allies. This may be why some people believe him to be less of a warmonger. But they are wrong. First, Bush is himself avowedly multilateralist: the Bush White House seldom misses an opportunity to emphasise his faith in multilateral institutions and international alliances, to boast of how many countries there are in the coalition against terror, or to claim that the Iraq war was necessary to save the credibility of the United Nations. Second, Kerry himself vigorously rejects the idea that US military action can be subject to a UN veto. In December, Kerry attacked his then contender, Howard Dean, on this very issue, and in February he said, ‘As president, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake.’ Even Kerry’s commitment to ‘a bold, progressive internationalism’ is in fact identical to George Bush’s repeated commitments to ‘keep open the path of progress’ in the ‘global democratic revolution’, and to provide ‘leadership’ in the ‘defence of freedom’. Both Bush and Kerry genuflect to the memory of the same Democratic presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

Kerry is actually more hawkish than Bush about the threat from Islam in general, and about Saudi Arabia in particular. Both of these are favourite neoconservative themes. While Bush has often emphasised that America has no quarrel with Islam, Kerry happily speaks about the specific danger to the USA from the Islamic world, using language which is not substantially different from that in the latest neo-con manifesto, An End to Evil by Richard Perle and David Frum. Kerry explicitly lists certain populations as representing a special danger to America — Saudi Arabians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indonesians and Pakistanis — and he reproaches George Bush’s own grandiose plan to ‘democratise’ the entire Middle East not for its overweening ambition, but instead for its timidity. Kerry has attacked the Bush administration for adopting a ‘kid gloves’ approach to the Saudi kingdom, which he has repeatedly accused of complicity in the funding of Islamic extremism and terror, and he has said the Saudi interior minister is guilty of ‘hate speech’ and of promoting ‘wild anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’. This recalls Frum and Perle’s surprising classification of Saudi Arabia as ‘an unfriendly power’.

Serious neocons, indeed, might be calculating that the bungling Bush is now more of a liability than an asset for their desire to remodel the Middle East, and to consolidate America’s unchallenged military power in the world. Kerry might be just what they need, in order to draw the sting of that left-wing anti-Americanism around the world, and in the US itself, which inspires so much antiwar feeling today. The Kosovo war showed that a war for human rights and against oppression, fought by a slick Democrat, plays far better with world public opinion than all that red-neck bull about dangers to national security. It will be far easier for President Kerry to fight new wars than for the mistrusted and discredited Bush. So to those who think that the election of a Democratic president will put an end to American militarism, I say, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’

© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk