Kerry on American Futility

James Taranto calls attention to (yet another) strange Kerry viewpoint, recounted in today’s Washington Post:

Kerry’s belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, “If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no.”

Mr. Taranto is, not unnaturally, appalled by the implication that “the U.N. – that club of dictators and anti-Semites – is worth dying for, but America isn’t”, but there is worse to be said. Notice Senator Kerry’s dichotomy: a “United Nations effort” vs. “American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome”. What about, American troops going in with the true “presumption that we can affect the outcome”?

In the Balkans, in fact, American power did affect the outcome decisively. Without the U.S., Old Europe could not have overcome so negligible a opponent as Milosevich’s Serbia. It was recognition of that reality that led the Europeans to seek our intervention. If they could have done the job themselves, an American presence would have been neither needed nor wanted.

Yet Senator Kerry, at least according to the Post (in an article clearly intended to be supportive), cannot so much as contemplate the prospect of successful American action on our own. No wonder he sees Iraq solely in shades of dark gray and fantasizes that the French or Germans will ride to our rescue. Such a mindset clarifies the debate about whether he would, as President, give foreign powers a de facto veto over our military options. If he believes that acting unilaterally is inevitably futile, of course he won’t waste money and lives in that fashion. By his lights, why should he?

The article has another ponderable:

A more recent theme for the senator from Massachusetts has been the importance of listening carefully to military advice. It is a subject he touched on in the past but seems to have emphasized more in the current campaign . . . Kerry says his Pentagon would be more respectful of the views of his generals than Bush’s has been. In August he told Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, that he would “have it a prerequisite that the secretary of defense work effectively with the professional military, listens to their advice, and . . . is respectful in the way we do disagree with it.”

That may be a sensible policy, but doesn’t it sound odd from a candidate who has repeatedly denounced the President for letting the military conduct the Tora Bora operation without civilian micromanagement? What President Kerry would “listen to”, it seems, is generals’ amateur advice, preferably hypercautious, on foreign politics, even as he second guessed their professional judgement on how to conduct combat operations.

The keynote of the Kerry campaign, above all else, is the futility of action, whether the challenge is terrorists abroad or the unfunded Social Security liability at home. In the words of the cool, conservative men of the musical 1776:

Why begin till we know that we can win?
And if we cannot win, why bother to begin?
We say this game’s not of our choosing.
Why should we risk losing?
We cool, cool men.

Sometimes it’s not hip to be cool.