WSJ's interesting editorial

How far we have come, says the Journal today.


With Kerry's speech basically declaring himself to be, still, anti-war. Some of the money quotes:

"Limiting the definition of the enemy to bin Laden and his associates makes little sense in an age when terrorists cavort with rogue states and multiply like blades of grass in the despotic soil of the Middle East. Without an Iraq-type plan for changing the region, the U.S. would seem condemned to a century of playing terrorist whack-a-mole. If Mr. Kerry has an alternative root-causes strategy, he has yet to articulate it."

This is the crux - had Kerry given us an alternative leader with a will to win, he'd be 20pts up. In an imporant way, the Dean campaign left the Democratic Party deeply wounded. It created a false sense of anti-war unity - 45% of the Dems were against the war. There is a good surfing metaphor here. It felt like gathering wave; Dem Candidates had to jump on or miss it. But the truth was this wave was still quite a ways off-shore - by the time it got close, there was little momentum and cohesion left. The force of the wave scattered. The candidates had to find other waves to ride - but now so close to the shore, it's hard to position yourself, hard to get behind an already cresting wave.

"When it comes to Iraq specifically, Mr. Kerry's picture of the country is unrealistically bleak and many of his proposals are already in motion. Iraqi security forces are being trained, after all, and Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Allawi remain committed to the January elections. As for getting other countries to share more of the burden, good luck. Sometimes we think we might enjoy a Kerry victory just for the spectacle of watching a Secretary of State Biden or Holbrooke try to convince the Europeans to accept responsibility for their own security, never mind Iraq's."

This always staggers me - that Europe can act so ingracious. The EU couldn't stop a amphibious ground invasion from Morocco without us.

"The line about making Iraq "the world's responsibility" was perhaps the most revealing in Mr. Kerry's speech. Whereas John F. Kennedy's Democrats pledged to "pay any price, bear any burden" in the promotion and defense of liberty, today's Vietnam-scarred party sees little or no special role for American providence in the world. And the world knows it. Such statements risk encouraging our Baathist and jihadist enemies in their belief that we lack staying power. Likewise, they signal to our potential Iraqi allies that it would be wise to avoid choosing sides until November."

"As we've noted before, one of the striking trends in recent years has been the complete role reversal of our two major parties in their philosophy of foreign policy, with Republicans pushing idealism and Democrats deriding it as 'neocon' folly."

It's amazing. Kennedy's quotes on this sort of thing always show up how bad the Democrats are on foreign policy today.