THE ILLIBERAL CANDIDATE

In arguing against the war in Iraq, one may say 1) that it shouldn't have been fought at all, 2) that it was fought "incompetently."

Kerry wants to do both. In this speech, he declares:

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

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.

This position is logically tenable. The administration might (1) have been mistaken in going to war, and then (2) handled the post-war situation very badly.

But (2) does undermine (1), because if the bloody mess that Iraq is today was not an inevitable result for the war, this weakens the case against the war.

Is twenty million freed worth twenty thousand dead? Well, a lot of Iraqis think so. I would think so if it were my country, even if I would end up as one of the dead. But "no" is a plausible answer.

But when Kerry suggests that Iraq is in a bad way only because of the administration's stubbornness and incompetence, the flip side of this is that the transition could have gone smoothly-- if, say, President Kerry were in charge. If so, that pushes us towards the conclusion that the war itself was the right solution, even if wrong choices were made afterwards.

When Kerry says that we shouldn't have fought the war even though he thinks the post-war transition could have been managed better and chaos and bloodshed, this suggests that it matters very little to John Kerry whether the Iraqis are free, or under Saddam's tyranny.

Given that John Kerry seems to have thought it morally indifferent whether the South Vietnamese had a free constitution or were subject to Communist tyranny, maybe this shouldn't surprise us. John Kerry is an illiberal man. And he always was.