[NYTr] Kerry Will Make His Groupies Look Like Fools: Luttwak

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Grrgory Elich (activ-l)

Sunday Telegraph - October 24, 2004

John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools

By Edward Luttwak

One of the more amusing spectacles of these less-than- amusing times is the
emergence of a Kerry fan club among European anti-war enthusiasts. The
letter-writing campaign of The Guardian to the voters of Clark County, Ohio,
is especially silly, but is only one of many examples.

Of course many people support John Kerry for the next president of the
United States for a variety of reasons - he is credible when he promises to
cut the Federal deficit, for example. But to support him in the hope that he
would make American military policy more doveish is absurd. All the evidence
is that he will do the exact opposite.

He has declared that he wants to increase the US Army by two divisions, more
than the total of Continental Europe's intervention troops. That too is a
credible promise, in part because Iraq has exposed an acute shortage of
ground forces and an excess of navy and air force personnel. But beyond any
specific policy positions, there is Kerry, the very combative man.

In the televised debates, when President Bush spoke of "defeating
terrorism", Kerry invariably spoke of "killing the terrorists". This was not
just an electoral pose: the words accurately reflect the character of the
man. He is a fighter, a two-fisted brawler. In all his past electoral
campaigns, successful or otherwise, he was always the more aggressive
candidate, ready to make wild accusations he knew to be false in the hope
that some voters would believe even the incredible. At the moment he is
telling older voters that Bush has a secret plan to cut their pensions by 45
per cent, and younger voters that Bush has a secret plan to re-introduce
compulsory military service.

And Kerry was certainly a fighter in Vietnam. Like many other well-born
Americans of the time, Kerry already opposed the war as contrary to US
strategic and economic interests (not as a pacifist) when he volunteered for
an extra tour of duty in Vietnam, having already served his compulsory year
safely aboard ship.

As all the world knows by now, he won a Silver Star by beaching the boat he
commanded, to jump off in pursuit of a Viet Cong guerrilla, whom he shot
dead. He did not have to be in Vietnam, he could have been at home; he did
not have to beach the boat - the standard tactic would have been to pull
back from the shore all guns firing, not ram the prow into the mud. And as
commander of the boat, he did not have to chase the guerrilla himself.

He did it all simply because he is a fighter, and a ferocious one. I am
quite certain that if Kerry had been president on September 11 he would have
reacted more violently than Bush, sending bombers into Afghanistan, not just
Special Forces scouts, and demanding immediate co-operation - or else - from
Saudi Arabia, not just Pakistan. European anti-militarists have really
picked the wrong guy as their hero.

It is true that Kerry opposed the 1991 Gulf War (as did Senator Nunn, among
other certified hawks) but he urged the use of force in Bosnia, regretted
the failure to invade Rwanda before that, approved the Panama intervention
of the first President Bush and was an enthusiast for the 1999 Kosovo war,
before voting in favour of the war in Iraq. If Kerry is elected next month,
he will certainly not act out his apparently clear-cut opposition to the war
by immediately withdrawing US forces from Iraq - although even the Bush
Administration is pursuing a form of disengagement, striving to add to the
number of Iraqi police and National Guard as quickly as possible rather than
sending more US troops. With a rifle strength of well under 60,000, there
are not even enough American soldiers to control the Baghdad area, let alone
the whole Sunni triangle.

Kerry is unlikely to change course. He too will pursue disengagement, with
the aim of leaving Iraq to its elected government after January, with as
much of an army, national guard and police force as can be built up in the
meantime.

The only difference - and here is the greatest irony - is that Kerry would
almost certainly disengage more slowly than Bush simply as a matter of
political positioning: he is the one more vulnerable to accusations of
abandoning Iraq to Islamic fanatics, warlord-priests and Saddam loyalists.

It is not just over Iraq that the hawkish Kerry will confound European
liberals. He has harshly criticised Bush for not being tough enough with
Iran - another irony, because it implies a preference for unilateral action
rather than the multilateral diplomacy he supposedly espouses.

Iran's fanatical priests and Revolutionary Guard thugs, having faked the
last elections, now rule the country behind the increasingly thin facade of
President Khatami's elected but powerless government. The extremists have
been playing a diplomatic game with the E3 - Britain, France and Germany -
and with the International Atomic Energy Authority, while using Iran's oil
revenues to import all the missile components and nuclear equipment they
can.

The Bush Administration has looked over the options for direct action,
everything from air strikes to sabotage but, increasingly committed in Iraq,
it has done nothing. It has instead focused on diplomacy to restrict Iranian
imports of forbidden materials from Russia and China, and on intelligence
operations to shut down smuggling networks.

All that is crucial, because in spite of boasts of self-sufficiency, Iran
can do little on its own. Gaining time is important: the fundamentalists are
increasingly unpopular, they represent a shrinking minority of the most
backward village population (and that, too, only in the half of the country
that is inhabited by Persians as opposed to other ethnic minorities), and
they will not be in power for ever.

What would Kerry do differently? Nothing much either way, most likely, but
it is simply an administrative inevitability that the air strike and
sabotage options will be examined once again. One wonders how The Guardian's
editorial would read if bombs ordered by a Kerry White House were to start
falling on Natanz and Arak, where the major nuclear facilities are being
built.

As for the more prosaic business of day-to-day military policy, Kerry is
unlikely to change the Bush plan of removing US forces from Cold War
garrisons in western Europe and Korea. Kerry advisers also agree with all
the "transformation" programmes of the Bush Administration - the change to
aircraft without pilots, to air bombing instead of artillery, to command
networks instead of hierarchies, to lighter, higher-quality forces.

Unless Kerry really does ask Congress for the money to add two Army
divisions, one will need a microscope to tell the difference in military
policy if Kerry wins the election. Perhaps The Guardian and its readers
should take a close look at those pictures of Kerry with his shotgun after
last week's goose shoot: there goes a genuine American hawk, red in tooth
and policy.

[Edward Luttwak is a senior fellow of the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies.]