Campaign bunker-buster
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on how the GWOT is and always has been a war of annihilation, and how we have to fight it the same way if we are to win. The passage most pertinent to Hugh Hewitt's symposium ("Did Kerry blunder in denouncing nuclear bunker busters? If so, why? If so, how great the damage to his candidacy?") was the following:
"Here is a pregnant parting point to ponder: suppose that Kerry were elected, and we withdrew from Iraq, it fell to the 'insurgents.' the Patriot Act was gutted, etc. And then, one bright, sunny morning in 2007, one or more suitcase nuclear devices annihilated the central business districts of one or more major American cities...Remember what 9/11 felt like? How much worse would it be with not three thousand killed, but three hundred thousand or three million?
"How much worse the options for the President, especially if it were Kerry and we no longer had substantial forces in the Middle East to exercise any conventional military options besides Clintonian symbolic pinpricks. If Iran were behind it, either primarily or tangentially, what could we do, since they'd have nuclear weapons of their own, targeted at Israel, to deter any such action? Or Pakistan, which was flipped over to our side in the war by George Bush and would be more likely to be abandoned by a Kerry White House, since, after all, according to Lurch any ally Dubya has made isn't "real"? They have nukes as well, and if the Islamists finally knock off President Musharraf, the nightmare scenario expands exponentially.
"Would an American president, ANY American president, incinerate Tehran to avenge the terrorist incineration of Los Angeles?"
With that scenario firmly in mind, let's revisit Senator Kerry's debate remarks on the development of "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons:
"Right now the President is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.
"You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.
"Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation."
What a left-wing laundry list. Distrust of weaponry instead of America's enemies; moral equivalency with those enemies; an implicit belief that George Bush would start selling bunker-busting nukes to the highest Third World bidder - through Halliburton, probably (unless somebody can deduce an alternative meaning for equating our development of this weapon with "nuclear proliferation"); and what I can only interpret as an inclination toward leniency to our enemies on Kerry's part by his incredulity at the prospect that "we might even contemplate using" them, unless he thinks Bush would be targeting Paris and Berlin.
This re-emergence of Kerry's nuclear freezenikism like the zombies in the Thriller video gives the lie to everything he tried to put over about his willingness to act pre-emptively in defense of American national security. Of course, so does his "Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" gibber-gabber, but this is even more egregious, because it further reduces alternative options to the use of conventional military force. This would be especially true in North Korea, where Kim jong-il's vast army far exceeds what Saddam had and already possesses nukes. And Iran is about to join them.
So, in the absense of nuclear bunker-busters, how would Kerry "disarm" these powers without "regime-change" when their nuclear facilities are buried far underground beyond the reach of any U.S. conventional ordnance? Kerry answered that question Thursday night: he'd give the mullahs nuclear fuel in return for their "promise" not to divert it to weapons applications. The very same Clinton gambit that made North Korea a nuclear power (and for which Kerry had the unmitigated gall to blame Bush).
To call this "soft-headedness" makes understatement a vast overstatement. To call this a toxic hurricane of wishful thinking, self-delusion, and egomania approaches rhetorical parity. To call it stark-raving lunacy in a post-9/11 world hits the bullseye. It is of a piece with the French prescription for Iraq, as reported this week in the International Herald Tribune:
"France said Monday that it would take part in a proposed international conference on Iraq only if the agenda included a possible U.S. troop withdrawal, thus complicating the planning for a meeting that has drawn mixed reactions.
"Paris also wants representatives of Iraq's insurgent groups to be invited to a conference in October or November, a call that would seem difficult for the Bush Administration to accept.
"The proposed conference aims partly to enlist the help of neighboring countries like Iran and Syria to block any cross-border attempts at destabilizing Iraq or interfering with elections." [my emphases]
Bush would (diplomatically, of course) laugh in their faces. But Kerry would fall off his windsurfer in his eagerness to sign up.
And that is why he will not win this election. Just look at two post-debate Gallup internals:
***Handling the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief: (pre-debate) Bush 55%, Kerry 42%; (post-debate) Bush 54%, Kerry 44%
***Demonstrated he is tough enough for the job: Bush 54%, Kerry 37%
As Hugh concluded Thursday night, "Game, set, match."
UPDATE: Or perhaps not...
"Here is a pregnant parting point to ponder: suppose that Kerry were elected, and we withdrew from Iraq, it fell to the 'insurgents.' the Patriot Act was gutted, etc. And then, one bright, sunny morning in 2007, one or more suitcase nuclear devices annihilated the central business districts of one or more major American cities...Remember what 9/11 felt like? How much worse would it be with not three thousand killed, but three hundred thousand or three million?
"How much worse the options for the President, especially if it were Kerry and we no longer had substantial forces in the Middle East to exercise any conventional military options besides Clintonian symbolic pinpricks. If Iran were behind it, either primarily or tangentially, what could we do, since they'd have nuclear weapons of their own, targeted at Israel, to deter any such action? Or Pakistan, which was flipped over to our side in the war by George Bush and would be more likely to be abandoned by a Kerry White House, since, after all, according to Lurch any ally Dubya has made isn't "real"? They have nukes as well, and if the Islamists finally knock off President Musharraf, the nightmare scenario expands exponentially.
"Would an American president, ANY American president, incinerate Tehran to avenge the terrorist incineration of Los Angeles?"
With that scenario firmly in mind, let's revisit Senator Kerry's debate remarks on the development of "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons:
"Right now the President is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.
"You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.
"Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation."
What a left-wing laundry list. Distrust of weaponry instead of America's enemies; moral equivalency with those enemies; an implicit belief that George Bush would start selling bunker-busting nukes to the highest Third World bidder - through Halliburton, probably (unless somebody can deduce an alternative meaning for equating our development of this weapon with "nuclear proliferation"); and what I can only interpret as an inclination toward leniency to our enemies on Kerry's part by his incredulity at the prospect that "we might even contemplate using" them, unless he thinks Bush would be targeting Paris and Berlin.
This re-emergence of Kerry's nuclear freezenikism like the zombies in the Thriller video gives the lie to everything he tried to put over about his willingness to act pre-emptively in defense of American national security. Of course, so does his "Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" gibber-gabber, but this is even more egregious, because it further reduces alternative options to the use of conventional military force. This would be especially true in North Korea, where Kim jong-il's vast army far exceeds what Saddam had and already possesses nukes. And Iran is about to join them.
So, in the absense of nuclear bunker-busters, how would Kerry "disarm" these powers without "regime-change" when their nuclear facilities are buried far underground beyond the reach of any U.S. conventional ordnance? Kerry answered that question Thursday night: he'd give the mullahs nuclear fuel in return for their "promise" not to divert it to weapons applications. The very same Clinton gambit that made North Korea a nuclear power (and for which Kerry had the unmitigated gall to blame Bush).
To call this "soft-headedness" makes understatement a vast overstatement. To call this a toxic hurricane of wishful thinking, self-delusion, and egomania approaches rhetorical parity. To call it stark-raving lunacy in a post-9/11 world hits the bullseye. It is of a piece with the French prescription for Iraq, as reported this week in the International Herald Tribune:
"France said Monday that it would take part in a proposed international conference on Iraq only if the agenda included a possible U.S. troop withdrawal, thus complicating the planning for a meeting that has drawn mixed reactions.
"Paris also wants representatives of Iraq's insurgent groups to be invited to a conference in October or November, a call that would seem difficult for the Bush Administration to accept.
"The proposed conference aims partly to enlist the help of neighboring countries like Iran and Syria to block any cross-border attempts at destabilizing Iraq or interfering with elections." [my emphases]
Bush would (diplomatically, of course) laugh in their faces. But Kerry would fall off his windsurfer in his eagerness to sign up.
And that is why he will not win this election. Just look at two post-debate Gallup internals:
***Handling the responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief: (pre-debate) Bush 55%, Kerry 42%; (post-debate) Bush 54%, Kerry 44%
***Demonstrated he is tough enough for the job: Bush 54%, Kerry 37%
As Hugh concluded Thursday night, "Game, set, match."
UPDATE: Or perhaps not...
posted by JASmius at 10:29 AM
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