Never

NEVER HAVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE elected as president a candidate with a record on national security issues resembling that of John Kerry. Consider some of the distinctive national security choices Kerry has made over the years.

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April 22, 1971: The American people have never elected president someone who, while serving in the military, chose to testify (in uniform) against a war his country was then waging. Lt. Kerry asserted before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his country and his fellow service members were guilty in Vietnam of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Indeed, Kerry asserted that the American military was "more guilty than any other body of violations of [the] Geneva Conventions." Kerry forthrightly rejected the bipartisan doctrine that had guided American foreign policy for a generation, deriding "the mystical war against communism." Kerry today remains proud of his testimony.

Fall 1984: The American people have never elected president someone who, in his first successful bid for federal office, chose to make support for a unilateral nuclear freeze and for major cutbacks in America's defense programs the centerpiece of his campaign. The freeze and the cutbacks would have weakened U.S.-European ties, emboldened the Soviet Union, and strengthened the hand of hardliners in the Kremlin. Kerry has never said that the position he took at this turning point in the Cold War was mistaken.

January 12, 1991: The American people have never elected president a senator who voted against an authorization for the use of military force, in this case in pursuance of a United Nations-approved policy to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Senator Kerry complained in 1991 that we were engaged in "a rush to war." It turned out that Saddam had been only months away from acquiring nuclear capability. Kerry now cites the first Gulf War as a success for the purpose of contrasting it with the recent one--but he has never acknowledged that his judgment in opposing that war might have been in error.

October 17, 2003: The American people have never elected president someone who voted against an appropriation to support troops fighting in a war he had approved. Contrary to misleading press accounts, such as this one from the October 8 USA Today, this was not a "typical Senate situation in which party members vote yes on their own version of a bill and then vote no on the other party's version." Fellow Democrat Joe Biden had cosponsored with Kerry an alternative supplemental appropriation that would have paid for the war by repealing part of the Bush tax cut. But when the alternative was defeated, Biden and 38 other Democratic senators, unlike Kerry, voted for the final bill. Indeed, Biden made the case for the president's proposal on the Senate floor. In fact, in the vote on final passage of the $87 billion, Kerry was joined by only 11 other senators, less than a quarter of his fellow Democrats. And of the 77 senators who had voted to authorize the war, only four--Kerry, John Edwards, Tom Harkin, and Ernest Hollings--now voted to deny the troops the support they needed. Kerry had himself said just a month before, "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of cutting and running. That's irresponsible." His vote against the $87 billion was irresponsible. Today he says he is proud of that vote.

September 23, 2004: The American people have never elected president someone who gratuitously attacked a visiting leader, in this case Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi, after a speech to a joint session of Congress, when that leader's government was fighting terrorists on a day-to-day basis alongside American troops.

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Will the American people choose as president someone with John Kerry's national security record? They never have before.

--William Kristol

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