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Edited on Tue Jul-08-03 11:02 PM by blm
Carville weighs in towards the end of this snip from Joe Klein's New Yorker piece from last December:
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Kerry's criticism of the Bush foreign policy is meticulous and comprehensive. It begins with the Administration's gratuitously ideological diplomatic actions in the year before the September 11th terrorist attacks. On Bush's decision to simply walk away from the Kyoto global-warming treaty, for example, he told me, "One hundred and sixty nations spent ten years working to get to a certain place and the United States just stands up and dismisses it out of hand. The Administration doesn't say we're going to try to fix it, doesn't say we respect your work, doesn't say we're going to try to find the common ground where we do have some differences. It just declares it dead. Now, what do we think those presidents of those countries, those prime ministers and those finance ministers, those environmental ministers are? Are they all dumb? Are we telling them they are absolutely incapable of making judgments about science, that the ten years of work that they've invested in conference after conference, many of which I attended, was absolutely for naught? That makes us friends in the world?"
Kerry extends this argument beyond the usual liberal critique: the unilateralist approach, he says, damages America's ability to do the intelligence gathering and wage the unconventional warfare that are at the heart of an effective campaign against terrorists and rogue states. He is critical of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations for their uncertain, and too frequently unsubtle, use of American power. Although he voted against the Gulf War in 1991, he has supported military action against Iraq in the years since-indeed, he was a co-sponsor of the resolution that threatened force against Iraq in 1998, when Saddam Hussein sent the United Nations weapons inspectors home. But he is a critic of the Pentagon's old-fashioned Cold War doctrine of overwhelming air power, its overcautious use of ground troops, and its skepticism about the efficacy of unconventional war-fighting assets, like the Special Forces. Early on, he criticized the Bush Administration for its tactics in Afghanistan, its slapdash and unsuccessful effort to trap the Al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora-and particularly its decision not to use American troops to surround the mountain redoubt. "When given the opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda, the President turned not to the best military in the history of man," he said in July, "but rather turned to Afghan warlords who only a week earlier were on the other side."
Kerry's foreign policy seems a muscular multilateralism: active, detailed engagement with the countries in the Middle East and elsewhere; less pompous rhetoric and more of the patient scut work-the diplomatic consultation, the building of direct relationships with local intelligence and police agencies-that will make an occasional use of force by America more palatable. There is an implication that much of the Bush Administration's bombast has been for domestic political consumption, an attempt to sound tougher than Bill Clinton did. "The Administration mistakes tough rhetoric for tough policy," Kerry told me. "They may gain short-term domestic advantage as a result, but they are damaging the long-term security of the country. This is a far more complicated world than the ideologues of the Administration care about or understand."
Finally, Kerry broadens his practical critique of Bush's foreign policy to add some vision. Specifically, he says that the President missed an opportunity, in the weeks after September 11th, to call the nation to a larger cause: energy independence. In October of 2001, Kerry proposed a concerted energy-conservation campaign, including higher fuel-efficiency standards in automobiles and a "Manhattan Project" to develop renewable sources of energy. "No American son or daughter should ever again be sent abroad to die for oil," he often says on the stump, invariably to ovations from the Democratic faithful.
This is a complicated message, and-except for the one sound bite-a difficult one to deliver at a political rally. But Kerry's knowledge and conviction, and the fact that his words sound different from the market-tested slogans that other Democrats were rehearsing this autumn, gave him a credibility that his competitors in the larval Presidential race were missing. For the first time in his career, he didn't seem precocious. "I think he's had a hell of a year," James Carville, the political strategist, said.. "Why? Because he's actually saying something. People do notice that, you know. The other thing is, 9/11 made the Commander-in-Chief part of the Presidency important again, and that's helped him, too, because of his military background. And, finally, he's not conflicted about this. He's not testing the waters. He's immersed in the waters. He's growing gills."
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Well, at least Carville noticed, and maybe a few others.
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