Round One Of The Debates
By Monte Kuligowski (10/04/04)
In my humble estimation, I would have to conclude that Sen. Kerry won the first debate on Iraq and the war on terror. Of course, having scripted lines memorized has little to do with having the necessary character to lead the nation. We might conclude that Kerry has exceptional skills of rhetoric, but the jury is still out on whether he has a moral core.
Kerry deflected the flip-flop charges somewhat effectively by stating, yes, he had always said Saddam was a threat, but, no, the president didn’t go about removing him in a wise manner. And even more, the president said he would only go to war as a “last resort,” and clearly when he sent our troops, this wasn’t the last resort.
Kerry charged that the US could have waited a little longer before launching an attack on Iraq. If the president had waited, he could have gone in with a stronger coalition, thus reducing our casualties and costs of the war. Additionally, Sen. Kerry asserted that by going in to Iraq, we left the real war on terror behind in Afghanistan. The US subcontracted out the capture of Osama bin Laden to local Afghani kids, so to speak, while the US military might was diverted to Saddam, who wasn’t even linked to 9/11. Unsurprisingly, Kerry couldn’t resist tossing in a little Michael Moore-type mantra, hinting that the real purpose of the war might have been for oil – by asserting that our troops guarded the oil reserves, rather than the borders. Because of an ill-planned war, we now have a mess in Iraq.
Bush responded by repeating over and over that the war in Iraq is “hard work.” But the constant echo of that fact didn’t address the specific attacks of John Kerry. For most of the debate President Bush appeared to be speaking more to his base, than to undecided voters. Nevertheless, the president made an excellent point in asserting that someone running for the job of commander-in-chief shouldn’t be sending “mixed messages” to the terrorists, the Iraqi people, our troops and their families. That was the most pertinent maxim of the evening. Those words might still be ringing in Sen. Kerry’s head.
To elaborate a bit, Kerry’s claim that the Iraq War is the “wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place” is clearly a reckless and irresponsible message. It sends terrorists the message that they can prevail. It sends the Iraqi people the message of ambivalence and despair. And it sends our troops the message that they are dying for nothing. If undecided voters could grasp the significance of Kerry’s words, this alone would disqualify him from attaining the high office. Regardless of how Kerry feels about the war, what kind of leader – other than a leader of an enemy nation – would dare utter such contempt against the war effort in the middle of the conflict?
Unfortunately for President Bush, the issue of Kerry’s war protesting tendencies had been neutralized by the Bush strategists themselves. The Bush campaign made the entire issue of Sen. Kerry’s character a non-issue by joining with Democrats to condemn the very important claims being made by the Swift Vets for Truth (but that’s another column, probably my next).
President Bush is not viewed as the winner of the first debate, in part, because he failed to nail down the following three points:
Firstly, the president could have reminded America that the major players of the UN Security Council were in bed with Saddam Hussein. So long as the oil-for-food program was lining the pockets of Jacques Chirac and company, it’s not likely the UN would have ever discerned a valid reason to remove their benevolent sugar daddy from power. It didn’t matter how high the stack of violated treaties and UN resolutions had grown.
Secondly, we knew Saddam was a friend of terrorists. It’s irrelevant that Hussein wasn’t directly involved with 9/11. Neither were most of the terrorists we’re now killing in the war on terror. Both Saddam and the terrorists were on the same page in that America was the common enemy. With that being the case, the war with Iraq was a preemptive strike. Everyone, including Sen. Kerry, knew that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons. If Saddam had been left unchecked, how difficult would it have been to transfer one of those little suitcase bombs into terrorist hands to be used in America? If something dreadful would have happened in the US, the same Democrats saying Bush rushed to war would instead be saying Bush was negligent for not acting in time.
Lastly, the president could have clutched the debate by solidly refuting Kerry’s claims that the Iraq War is a diversion from the real war on terror. To the contrary, the war on terror is being fought in Iraq right this minute. It was John Kerry who unwittingly admitted that foreign terrorists are crossing the Iraqi borders to engage US troops and murder civilians. What is the war on terror but the hunting down and killing of terrorists? And that’s what we’re doing in Iraq. Excuse me, we’re killing them, they’ve made the hunting down part easy. They’re coming to the venue of our armed forces. Al-Qaida is just one out of a large multitude of terrorist groups from the many countries of the Muslim world, presently fighting against our military right now, in Iraq. The Egyptian-born terrorist Ayman al-Zawahri, and other terrorist leaders, are summonsing the “youth of Islam” to fight on and to “continue the path after us, and don’t betray God and his prophet.” There’s no doubt this war on terror is a long-term venture.
It can’t be uttered loudly enough that it’s better to kill terrorists overseas than to let them kill us in our homeland. And this is exactly what the Iraq War is accomplishing for America. The mess in Iraq that Sen. Kerry sees is really the war on terror. The conflict is in the eye of the beholder. It’s either seen through the cold pessimism of John Kerry or the optimistic eye of George W. Bush.
Kerry might have won the first debate, but it’s doubtful he can win the war.
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