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The Bush Doctrine vs. The Kerry Doctrine
By Matt Margolis | October 3, 2004
Saturday in Ohio, Bush blasted what will now be known as the Kerry Doctrine:
“In the debate Senator Kerry said something revealing when he laid out the Kerry Doctrine. He said America has to pass a ‘global test’ before we can use American troops to defend ourselves. … Senator Kerry’s approach to foreign policy would give foreign governments veto power over our own national security decisions. I take a different view. When our country is in danger, the President’s job is not to take an international poll. The President’s job is to defend America. I work every day with our friends and allies for the sake of freedom and peace, but our national security decisions must be made in the Oval Office, not foreign capitals.”
Who do you want leading the war on terror? Bush with the doctrine of preemption, or Kerry with his permission slip policies?
Click the image to download a large JPG version showing exactly what the Kerry Doctrine means. Or click here for the PDF version.
Topics: John Kerry Watch |
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October 3rd, 2004 at 8:39 pm
You should have listened better to the debates. Kerry said nothing about other countries, when it came to defense.
His comment about relations with other countries had to do with pre-emptive attacks.
And you do know that you’re blowing the “global test” term out of proportion, right?
Well, I guess it’s because you have nothing else to hold on to.
Try to listen better during the 2nd debate.
October 3rd, 2004 at 9:43 pm
wow, marshall you really need to to re-watch that debate…
October 3rd, 2004 at 10:20 pm
That’s a good response, Matt. You really showed me!
October 4th, 2004 at 7:53 am
you should work for karl rove
October 4th, 2004 at 11:51 am
wow matt is a sad character these days. Grasping at straws…Gee what did FoxNews do lately to make shit up about Kerry? Matt’s no better. Lame.
October 4th, 2004 at 12:55 pm
This is a piece written by novelist E.L. Doctorow.
It first appeared in the September 9th issue of the Easthampton Star
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer
the death of our twenty-one-year-olds who wanted to be what they could
be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the
lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what
death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of
necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower
could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the
mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table
for the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up
to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened
crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He
doesn’t understand
why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech
written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young
Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you
study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion
which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no
capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the
thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or
wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly
torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance
of aborted life…. they come to his desk as a political liability,
which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of
their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he
regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war
was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that
his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his
mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than
controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never
mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war
of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind
to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those
costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one
of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you
want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not
to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This
president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one
thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for
the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well
as anything.
You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you.
Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he
is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving
parents and wives and children.
He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the
families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of
us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who
cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose
lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of he
chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills—it is amazing for how
many people in this country this President does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he
is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax
burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air
we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the
safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and
that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for
overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them
into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify
with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he
and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I
remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched
against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused
oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why
did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever
seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of
people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of
mankind. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its
back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to
advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the
kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people,
now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other
means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president
the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our
malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds
of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The
people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and
get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify
his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of
our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as
the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective
warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the
monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn
but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn
for ourselves.
E.L. Doctorow
October 4th, 2004 at 1:22 pm
MATT you want to know his plan…Well this was copied from his website JOHNKERRY.COM. Which If you really listened to the debates he asked you to go to if you wondering about his plan(s). So since you could not I pasted some segments from it. Again Matt what you a nd president Bush need to do is become educated then you can have a real dialouge. Stop watching FOX and start to read and think for yourself.
From the kerry website.
October 4th, 2004 at 2:48 pm
Breaking News…Developing..Saddam had extensive ties to terror..
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\SpecialReports\archive\200410\SPE20041004a.html
October 4th, 2004 at 4:28 pm
I remember E.L. Doctorow
October 5th, 2004 at 1:50 am
Ugh. Cleanup on Aisle 10.
About that master plan of Kerry’s… France and Germany aren’t about to send their people to Iraq, since the Iraqi citizens remember them as good buddies of Saddam. Kerry’s ability to beg in French won’t matter, Jacque already said so. Looking at the numbers, GW2 was less unilateral than Korea was.
We are training the Iraqi police and military as fast as we can. The terrorists are attacking police stations and recruiting posts; they see the threat to their actions. Samarra is now under the rule of law, and other rogue areas will follow. To do more, we would have to have more troops. Note that training our troops takes 2 years from start to competency, and lowers the combat readiness of the unit they are in during that time.
Me, I want to see where Kerry will get the people to double the SF without diluting the standards to the point of uselessness. The combination of skills that make up SF’ers are rare, and their talents are well-paid in the civilian market.
Kerry’s plan isn’t even decent 20/20 hindsight.
October 5th, 2004 at 4:36 am
“You should have listened better to the debates. Kerry said nothing about other countries, when it came to defense.
His comment about relations with other countries had to do with pre-emptive attacks.”
What a moron. It doesn’t take a high school graduate to realize that there may be times when a pre-emptive attack could be vital to our nation’s defense.
Here are a few reasons why Kerry’s position is so pathetic:
1. He refers to our allies as the “coalition of the bribed”, yet states that he would have asked France what more could we have given them.
2. He actually expects us to believe that he would have known the magic words for the French and Germans to go along? Only a moron would believe that.
3. Let me see if I understand Kerry’s position. We needed a larger coalition. There were no WMDs. Right? So…if there was a much larger coalition, one that included France, Germany, and Arab countries…and if there had been incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had WMDs (for example…if he had actually used them), then Kerry would say that the war was the right thing to do, right?
Wrong. In 1991, when we had a much larger coalition, one that included all the European allies and many Arab allies, including Saudi Arabia, and when Saddam had very recently use WMDs and ABSOLUTELY DID have WMD stockpiles, and on top of it actually invaded another country, Kerry voted AGAINST the war. That, in a nutshell, is why Kerry’s current position is so dishonest. All of the conditions that Kerry now wants to put on this war, he failed to live up to when he had the chance in 1991.
October 5th, 2004 at 12:09 pm
By definition, preemptive means we’re making the first move. Check a dictionary.
It is different than defense.
Also, if it’s national security that you’re worried about, you should be concerned that Al Queda has dramatically increased over the past four years, worldwide. In addition, other terrorist groups have sprung up. People, elsewhere, now hate the United States. The time when we could say they’re jealous is now over. They’re not jealous anymore. It’s just pure hate! That should scare you. Increasing the number of enemies we have is never a good thing!
October 5th, 2004 at 5:55 pm
Let’s say I know someone wants to beat me up. I find out that the next time he sees me he will beat me up. He has been violent with me in the past. I then see him walking towards me. Before he attacks me, I pre-emptively throw the first punch and knock him on his hide.
That is self defense, my friend.
October 5th, 2004 at 6:01 pm
Michael,
Here’s the key: your friend was violent with you in the past.
Iraq wasn’t. Threatening, but not violent. Had they been violent, we would’ve attacked them then.
Try another analogy.
October 5th, 2004 at 11:18 pm
To Matt Margolis-
I was looking for a method of contact for you. I think we may have been sitting at the same table in hamilton yesterday listening to the 44th president of the US. e-mail me a macarleo@comcast.net I’d like to chat with you about a few things…
Mark
October 6th, 2004 at 1:56 am
Analogy/metaphor:
COnsidering WMD’s.
I put a gun to your head beacause I heard a “rumor” you were going to use them let alone had them-then I shoot you . Only later to find out none of it was true..I guess ishould say what bush says huh?”Oh well were beteer off without you. Please everyone THINK!
October 6th, 2004 at 4:18 am
“By definition, preemptive means we’re making the first move. Check a dictionary.
It is different than defense.”
American Heritage Collegiate, published by Houghton Mifflin. Pre-emptive: 3a. Relating to or constituting a military strike made so as to gain the advantage WHEN AN ENEMY STRIKE IS BELIEVED TO BE IMMINENT.”
Obviously, the imminent strike by the enemy makes the pre-emptive strike defensive, by definitiion.
This type of moronic thinking is why the country will not turn national security over to Kerry. OK…since you seem to be having a hard time figuring out the logic, let me try and put it on a high school level. If we knew everything about Osama, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban that we know now, back on 7/1/01, and we had pre-emptively invaded Afghanistan, that would have beem pre-emptive. Yes, we would have been striking first. And yes, it also would have been defensive. And the fact that Kerry would have insisted on permission by our alleged “allies” is why Americans will not turn over the keys to him.
October 6th, 2004 at 4:25 am
“It’s just pure hate! That should scare you. Increasing the number of enemies we have is never a good thing!
And I suppose that from WTC 1, to the Embassy bombings, to the USS Cole the number of our enemies was actually decreasing, and love for America was going up, right? If you are too young to remember those events, go away and don’t come back until you do some frigging homework. Unlike during the previous administration, attacks have decreased, largely because we no longer treat terrorism as a “law enforcement” problem.
October 6th, 2004 at 11:54 am
“Here’s the key: your friend was violent with you in the past.
Iraq wasn’t. Threatening, but not violent. Had they been violent, we would’ve attacked them then.
Try another analogy. ”
OK…once again…let’s make it plain enough for the children in our audience to understand. Same analogy…only say that the guy had been violent with his two next door neighbors instead of us. Which Iraq had been.
Checkmate. Give it up.
October 7th, 2004 at 4:22 pm
Unlike those who erase their memory banks every week or so, to make room for new talking points, I do remember the recent 9/11 hearings? Remember? When President Bush was excoriated for NOT taking preemptive action when he learned that some terrorists had been threatening the U.S., and some of them had talked about hijacking some airplanes?
And now the problem with President Bush is that he DID make a preemptive strike against a country which not only supported terrorists of all types, no matter what they called themselves, but which all believed had the ability to arm those very terrorists with chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons.
In the sweet, uncomplicated world of the Left, a terrorist signs on with one group, under one name, and stays there. He would never belong to any other group. He would never collaborate with any other group. He would never support any other group. He would have allegiance only to his little band of brothers, and they would remain separate, independent, and aloof from all others.
Therefore, it would be easy to tell them all apart. Taliban would never intermingle with Al-Queda. Sadaam would never support Al-Queda because they have a religious base and he was secular.
It’s a simple place, LeftLand, but it doesn’t have any relationship to reality. In the Real World, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and therefore all anti-West terrorist groups have the same goal, if for different reasons. In the Real World, Sadaam would not refuse to aid or finance Al-Queda because they were on a religious jihad and he wanted the U.S. destroyed for other reasons. No, in the Real World, he would help with finances, he would make his own training camps available to Al-Queda operatives, and he would certainly offer them weapons of mass destruction as soon as he got the remaining (weakened)sanctions lifted and he could safely resume manufacturing them. (Within as little as a week, for mustard gas.)
Fortunately for the Left, the Bush administration has been protecting ALL of us,not just those who voted for him and who think he is doing the right thing.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, a weakened United States, weakened by the election of a pacifist, poll-driven, unfocused liberal, will put ALL of us in danger. Our only hope is that the terrorists would be as confused as the rest of us. Will he attack only after being attacked, or will he engage in preemptive attacks? Will he demand a prior approval from other nations, or won’t he? Will his coalition be of global countries, or of others? What others? ??????