Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Stylistically, Kerry's speech outlining his plans to fight terrorism Friday at Temple University was among the best of his campaign. He was forceful, he was passionate, and he hit Bush hard before a fired-up crowd.

But a close reading reveals that Kerry's attacks were less substantive than they appeared. They were a string of logical fallacies, half-truths, and smart-sounding criticisms followed by generic, vague pledges to do better.

When we look at the images of children brutalized by remorseless terrorists in Russia, we know that this is not just a political or military struggle — it goes to the very heart of what we value most, our families. It strikes at the bond between a mother and child. As president, I will make it my sacred duty to be able to say to every mother and father in this country, I am doing everything in my power to keep your children safe.

It is good to see Kerry finally discussing the Beslan school massacre — as the Kerry Spot noted, for several days after the attack, the Democratic candidate had nothing to say beyond a two-paragraph released statement lamenting the "tragedy" and the "senseless deaths." It is good to see Kerry finally calling it brutality instead of using the antiseptic, blameless term tragedy — appropriate for an earthquake or natural disaster — and calling their deaths murders instead of mere "deaths."

Instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan...the president rushed to a new war in Iraq. That was the wrong choice.

Was Iraq a distraction? Are we using forces in Iraq that would otherwise be in Afghanistan? For most of the 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the answer is "no." See here. As Reuel Marc Gerecht puts it, "With the possible exception of the deep jungles of the Amazon, the southeastern border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is the worst area imaginable to play a lethal version of hide and seek. You could pour tens of thousands of troops into that terrain and only marginally improve the chances of finding your target."

The hunt for Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of al Qaeda's head honchos is complicated by the terrain, by the difficulties of finding individual persons spread out over a large area, by the loyalties of the local tribes, and by cooperation from the Pakistanis, particularly given how much their intelligence services can be trusted.

Is finding bin Laden just a matter of troop quantity? If we piled the 130,000 or so U.S. troops currently in Iraq onto the Afghan-Pakistani border, would we find Osama and Ayman? Or would the whole region rebel against the U.S. troops and the Pakistani government? If we were facing a conventional mechanized army under the Taliban, with tanks and artillery and armored personnel carriers, more troops would make sense. But the remaining Taliban types and al Qaeda in the region are bands of irregulars that look like something out of a Mad Max movie. Quick-hitting, mobile groups of special forces and air strikes seem like the better tool.

Instead of listening to the uniformed military, his own State Department, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, and outside experts about how to win the peace in Iraq...the president hitched his wagon to the ideologues who told him our troops would be welcomed as liberators. That was the wrong choice.

We could go on all week, with each side pointing to the Iraqis whose reactions they want to portray as the overall reaction. There are Iraqis
who didgreet the Americans as liberators, and those who didn't. For either proponents or opponents of the war to contend the Iraqi reaction was entirely one or the another is a silly argument.

Instead of responding to the greatest intelligence failure in our history with a rapid overhaul of our intelligence system...the president dragged his feet and actually resisted reform.

And this is why John Kerry missed the vote on Porter Goss's CIA nomination.

Instead of proposing a Department of Homeland Security...the president actually opposed it — and then exploited it for political purposes. That was the wrong choice.

Yes, Bush initially opposed it. So what? Once the president got behind it, the concept changed from a nutty idea from Joe Lieberman to the central policy proposal of the Bush administration in 2002. And the Democrats — including John Kerry — stood with the public-sector unions and demanded that employees at the new department have the same right to refuse reassignments that employees at say, the Department of Agriculture have, instead of the you-go-where-you're-needed policies of the FBI and other security-related agencies. Ask Max Cleland how popular this stand was with Georgia voters.

Instead of facing the urgent nuclear dangers in North Korea and Iran... he allowed these dangers to mount on his presidential watch.

Notice Kerry gave no specifics about what exactly Bush has done wrong in each area. After arguing that Bush was too unilateral on Iraq, Kerry has criticized the Bush administration for being too multilateral, insisting on six-party talks with North Korea. The North Koreans want to negotiate directly with the United States, and Bush has refused. A Kerry administration would, presumably, concede on this point and meet Kim Jong-Il's demands. Also note that one of Kerry's most frequently cited foreign-policy advisers is Madeline Albright, architect of the foreign-aid-in-exchange-for-promises treaty that the North Koreans violated.

On Iran, we have seen the mullahs reject every offer that the Europeans have made, and march forward with their nuclear programs — and the Kerry-Edwards team's conclusion is that these offers are not generous enough. Their proposal is to offer the Iranians additional aid in constructing a non-weapon-oriented nuclear program to "call their bluff." Just what the Kerry administration would do if the Iranians turned down the offer is unclear.

The war on terror is as monumental a struggle as the Cold War.

Interesting comparison, since John Kerry urged the U.S. to leave Vietnam, opposed the invasion of Grenada, opposed Reagan's defense buildup, and met with the Sandinistas. Cliff Kincaid called it "his disastrous Neville Chamberlain-style diplomacy with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Shortly after becoming a Senator, Kerry took off for Nicaragua with Tom Harkin on a freelancing fact-finding tour, the purpose of which was to stymie congressional support for the Contras by 'finding' that the Sandinistas weren't such bad guys after all." Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz "was so flabbergasted by Kerry's shilling for Ortega that he denounced Kerry publicly for 'dealing with the Communists' and letting himself be 'used.'"

Kerry continued,

But three years after 9/11, we see our enemies striking — in Spain, in Turkey, in Indonesia, in Kenya, and now every day — in the most despicable and gruesome ways in Iraq, which was not a terrorist haven before the invasion. In fact, there were more terrorist attacks in the world last year than the year before.

Ah, but how many terrorist attacks occurred on American soil since 9/11 (knocking on wood)?

And if there was only the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was that a good year in the war on terror? How about 1999, the year after the embassy bombings? Is success in the war on terror measured solely by how many attacks our enemies make on Americans and their allies? Isn't an even more important measurement how many attacks Americans and their allies make on terrorists? Isn't this statement rather illustrative of Kerry's defense-oriented mindset?

And we see an administration in confusion; we hear the president, the commander in chief, proclaiming one day that this war can't be won and then saying something different the next day.

Conceding that the president's statement last month was a gaffe, we know what Bush meant — bin Laden's not going to sign a formal surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. Besides, is John Kerry really the guy who ought to be pointing fingers at others about flip-flopping?

And we hear the secretary of defense himself wondering whether the radicals are recruiting, training, and deploying more terrorists than we're capturing or killing.

You see, this is why everyone keeps rehashing the same spin and talking points in Washington. Rumsfeld stated the obvious — unless we have spies counting aspiring jihadists in each madrassa, and can get copies of detailed personnel records of each al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist cell, we can't tell whether we're eliminating terrorists faster than the cells can recruit them. But because all of his critics jumped on the statement and are waving it around like an admission of defeat on the war on terror, any serious discussion, like the serious discussion that Kerry was pining for earlier in this speech, is impossible. How, pray tell, will Kerry assess the rate of terrorist recruitment? What's his plan?

Kerry's speech wasn't all bad. This section was oddly straightforward:

To destroy our enemy, we have to know our enemy. We have to understand that we are facing a radical fundamentalist movement with global reach and a very specific plan. They are not just out to kill us for the sake of killing us. They want to provoke a conflict that will radicalize the people of the Muslim world, turning them against the United States and the West. And they hope to transform that anger into a force that will topple the region's governments and pave the way for a new empire, an oppressive, fundamentalist super-state stretching across a vast area from Europe to Africa, from the Middle East to Central Asia.

Hurrah! The Democratic candidate understands the threat! Now let's hear his recommendations:

As president, I will expand our Army by 40,000 troops so that we have more soldiers to find and fight the enemy. I will double our Army Special Forces capacity. And we will accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies to track down and bring down terrorists.

All of this is good, but basically Kerry is saying, "Bush has done X; I, as a new president, with a new cabinet, and with a Congress controlled by the opposition party, will do X faster, spend more money on it, and do it better."

I will strengthen our intelligence system to detect and stop the terrorists before they can strike. By the morning of September 12, everyone in America knew that our intelligence wasn't as good as it needed to be. But three years later, believe it or not, we read that the CIA unit charged with finding bin Laden has fewer experienced case officers today than it had before 9/11.

This is a misdirection. How about overall al Qaeda analysts? CIA Director George J. Tenet declared "war" on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in 1998, but had only five agency analysts assigned to study the group at the time of the September 11 attacks. I'm sure the exact number of CIA analysts studying al Qaeda today is a state secret, but there are now two separate branches — the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the TTIC, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center — focusing specifically on the threat posted by the organization and the affiliated groups.

When I am president, that will change. I will act immediately to implement the 9/11 commission recommendations. I will create a national intelligence director with all the budget and personnel authority the commission says is needed to keep us safe. I will double our overseas clandestine service, train the linguists and Arab experts we need, and make sure the operation — hunting down bin Laden and al Qaeda — has all the resources it needs.

Again, more spending, faster, etc., but no real difference in policies, just pledges to do the same thing better.

I will make Afghanistan a priority again, because it is still the front line in the war on terror. As president, I will not subcontract the fight to warlords who are out for nothing but power and personal gain. I will help the government of Afghanistan expand its authority beyond Kabul to the rest of the country. I will lead our allies to share the burden, so that NATO finally provides more troops. I will show the world that America finishes what it begins.

How? How, how, how? These are assertions, not plans. If Kerry doesn't like working with warlords in Afghanistan, just who else does he think he's going to be able to work with? Just how many secular, democratic-minded regional leaders unafraid of assassination does he expect to find in that country?

Then Kerry talks for several paragraphs about securing Russia's nuclear arsenal. This is a nice idea, although President Bush hasn't exactly been asleep on this issue. According to the White House, the president has "eliminated the WMD programs and SCUD-C missiles in Libya; brought to a close Saddam Hussein's decades-long pursuit of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; closed down the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network; achieved the unanimous passage of UNSCR 1540 that requires states to enact legislation that criminalizes proliferation activities; provided record-level resources devoted to Nunn-Lugar and other nonproliferation assistance, including through the creation of the G-8 Global Partnership, which will provide $20 billion to this effort over 10 years; signed into law Project BioShield, which provides new tools to improve medical countermeasures protecting Americans against a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) attack; and established the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a broad international partnership of countries to coordinate actions to interdict proliferation shipments of WMD and related materials — at sea, in the air, and on land — and to shut down proliferation networks and entities."

Kerry talks a bit about his plan Iran and North Korea, which we discussed earlier.

As president, I will do what President Bush has not: I will hold the Saudis accountable. Since 9/11, there have been no public prosecutions in Saudi Arabia, and few elsewhere, of terrorist financers. I will work with our allies, with the World Bank and international financial institutions to shut down the financial pipeline that keeps terrorism alive. And I will pursue a plan to make this nation energy independent of Mideast oil. I want an America that relies on our own innovation and ingenuity, not the Saudi Royal Family.

This would be great, although notice Kerry doesn't give any specifics about how he would do it. And ending our dependence on Saudi oil isn't going to happen overnight (since we know Kerry doesn't support more drilling domestically) . In fact, we would be lucky to achieve energy independence in a second Kerry term, or in either term of an Edwards presidency.

Also, few publications have been more critical of the Saudis than NRO, but let's recognize this fact: If the U.S. were to no longer consider the House of Saud an ally, would that really improve anything? The forces opposed to the royal family are even more radical than the House of Saud. Critics on the left and the right should recognize that there aren't many good options out there, and that there is no feminist, secular, democratic multicultural political movement waiting to take power.

Towards the end of Kerry's speech, the false suppositions add up fast and furious.

We know that al Qaeda members and other terrorists could cross into America from Mexico and Canada. We are now told that America's borders have grown even more porous since September 11. And 9/11 commission staff report that our border inspectors don't even have the "training" and "basic intelligence" information to keep out terrorists.

Would a President Kerry do anything to secure America's borders and, accordingly, reduce illegal immigration? Would he take on his own party, the business interests that benefit from massive illegal immigration, and the Democrats who hope to turn these illegal immigrants into loyal party voters? Does his record suggest he is the sort of leader who often challenges his party's orthodoxy?

Costly new nuclear weapons we don't need that risk fueling a new arms race.

See here. Ceasing research into bunker-busters reduces America's ability to deter attacks. As Keith Payne, president of the National Institute for Public Policy, and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for forces policy puts it, "The question is, are you going to have the ability to hold these people in underground bunkers at risk? If you take this as an option off the table, you've given Kim Jong-Il a sanctuary. Allowing opponents to have a sanctuary undermines deterrence enormously."

At a time when police officers are more critical than ever to our homeland security, this president gutted the program to put 100,000 new police on our streets. I will restore that funding and make sure the money reaches our first responders.

The COPS program didn't reduce crime. See here. "A study conducted by the Heritage Foundation found that, after accounting for yearly state and local law enforcement expenditures and other socioeconomic factors, COPS grants both for the hiring of additional officers and for redeployment (MORE grants) did not reduce rates of violent crime by a statistically significant amount. That same Justice Department study found that police departments that reported 54 percent of the nation's homicides since the program began received only 31 percent of its grants. In other words, much of the money went to jurisdictions that already had low crime rates...the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General has found the program to be rife with abuse."

Sixth, we will promote the development of free and democratic societies throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Millions of people there share our values of human rights, and our hopes for a better life for the next generation. They are facing their own struggle at home against the forces of fanaticism and militancy. They are our natural allies. Their lost trust in our intentions must be restored. We must reach out to them and yes we must always promote democracy. I will be clear with repressive governments in the region that we expect to see them change — not just for our sake but for their own survival.

Which makes one wonder why Kerry has done nothing but gripe and moan and second-guess America's effort to establish a free and democratic society in Iraq, and why his recent statements have indicated he would pull out U.S. troops as soon as possible and leave this strategically vital nation to Muqtada al-Sadr and Abu Zarqawi.

Finally, Kerry gives a glimpse of the blueprint his administration would follow for foreign intervention: The glories of the Kosovo campaign.

President Clinton built a real coalition in Kosovo, and now virtually every soldier on patrol there comes from a foreign country. During the Cold War, every American president understood what is still true today: The strength of our country is vital but so is the character of our country. It is better to be an America that rallies others to our cause than an America that has to go it alone.

Actually, it is better to be an America that gets the job done, with or without allies than an America that has to wait for Luxembourg, Iceland, Denmark and every other member of NATO to sign off on a list of bombing targets while ethnic cleansing is going on.

It's good that Kerry has ignored bad advice to focus on domestic issues, and it's good that he recognizes the importance of having a serious, coherent, and detailed policy on fighting terrorism. Unfortunately, as Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele said at the GOP convention, "Hope is not a strategy."

As the president may say during this week's debate, "It's not even a strategery."