Does Kerry want Iraqi elections - and more allies - or doesn't he?

John Kerry at New York University, four days ago:

"The President must take immediate, urgent, essential steps to guarantee that the promised election can be held next year. Credible elections are key to producing an Iraqi government that enjoys the support of the Iraqi people, and an assembly that could write a constitution and yields a viable power-sharing agreement."

John Kerry, yesterday, in his belittlement of Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi:

"'The prime minister and the President are here obviously to put their best face on the policy, but the fact is that the CIA estimates, the reporting, the ground operations and the troops all tell a different story,' Kerry said.

"Allawi told a joint meeting of Congress that democratic elections will take place in Iraq in January as scheduled, but Kerry said that was unrealistic.

"'The United States and the Iraqis have retreated from whole areas of Iraq,' Kerry told reporters outside a Columbus firehouse. 'There are no-go zones in Iraq today. You can't hold an election in a no-go zone.'" [My emphases]

What happened between these two utterances? Well, goodness, that isn't even much of a rhetorical question, is it? Prime Minister Allawi's address to a joint session of Congress, of course, which was so powerful and eloquent that it elicited repeated standing ovations from Republicans and almost all the assembled Democrats as well (doubtless an "inauthentic" response from the latter, but an indication of the prevailing political winds, another bad sign for Kerry). There in the House rostrum stood a man who is attempting a task - building his country into a democracy - that no American has faced in over two centuries, with the added handicap of foreign subversion that has, among other things, resulted in at least three attempts on his life. He completely stomped into chunky salsa the new "Iraq is Vietnam" riff to which the once and current anti-war agitator has turned in his rising desperation, displaying all the courage and selflessness of which John Kerry has proven himself so totally bereft.

So the once, current, and future junior senator from Massachusetts ran to the nearest press microphones within thirty minutes of Mr. Allawi's address and, in essence, called the Iraqi Prime Minister and American ally a liar and a Bush "puppet," an expression of abject contempt more explicitly echoed subsequently by his campaign surrogates.

(Remember the last time Kerry did this? Right after the President's acceptance speech at the GOP convention. Which ought to give you an idea of how effective and moving Mr. Allawi's words really were.)

This was a disgrace. John Kerry is a disgrace. Next thing you know he'll be droning on about the new Iraqi government "cutting off limbs, cutting off heads, blowing up bodies, razing the countryside in a manner reminiscent of Saddam Hussein," etc.

But it's nothing new. With John Kerry nothing is EVER new, because he's already said it before. Six months ago he was denouncing our Coalition allies in Iraq as "coerced and bribed" - a particularly despicable insult given that it was Kerry's "allies," France, Germany, and Russia (he didn't always think so highly of them, though...), who were on Saddam's payroll - and just this week he had his kid sister down in Australia trying to do al Qaeda's dirty work for them by running down another ally, Prime Minister John Howard, and trying to get him thrown out of office. Now he pisses in the face of the leader of the country we just liberated who came to our capital to express his gratitude to America for Iraqi freedom. And he doesn't even have the balls to do it in person, but does so from a thousand miles away.

What a coward.

And, once more, hypocrite. On Monday Kerry insisted that holding Iraqi elections on schedule was imperative; yesterday he blew them off as "unrealistic." He all but called Allawi delusional for acknowledging previously that Syria and Iran are invading his country with "insurgent" forces and then declaring in his speech his determination to hold the elections despite this resistance.

And this is from the same man that just this morning, for the umpteenth time, declared, "As president, I will fight a tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror," and yet calls the central front in that war a "quagmire" from which he wants to cut & run as soon as possible.

So, to sum all of this up, from his own recent words, John Kerry wants to fight a "tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror" by fleeing from the terrorists, and he wants to build up our alliances by kicking all their members that he doesn't like square in the groin and replacing them with rivals who will never join us and want to see us fail as badly as Kerry himself does.

I recall Al Gore saying four years ago that he would "do anything to win." In his case, "anything" included a bloodless coup attempt in which the Constitution itself was no obstacle.

By willfully and knowingly undermining his own country's national security and that of our allies, and thereby endangering the lives of American soldiers and civilians just to get into position to sue his own way to the White House, John Kerry has done Fat Albert one "better."