Sen. Kerry: the record

For the past 17 years, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted at least 459 committee or subcommittee hearings attended, at least in apart, by the junior senator from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry. Now, admittedly, wading through tens of thousands of pages of committee transcripts is not fun. And unlike Al Franken, I didn’t have a team of eager Harvard liberal interns to do my work for me.

But from just 10 of these hearings, I have found some wonderful Kerry nuggets that are, indeed, food for thought. In 1989, for example, during the secretary of state confirmation hearings for James Baker, Mr. Kerry called for “acid rain” issues to be put on an equal footing with the reduction of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union.

No doubt Mr. Kerry was somewhat confused about the seriousness of the Soviet nuclear threat to the United States, or maybe he thought acid rain was really bad. But either way, his contempt for the Reagan and Bush administrations’workonnuclear-weapons reductions efforts came through when he complained at a subsequent hearing to the Arms ControlandDisarmament Agency (ACDA) director that the U.S. INF treaty proposal to eliminate all Soviet SS-20 nuclear- tipped missiles, as well as U.S.-deployed ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMS) and Pershings, was “was put out fundamentally as a joke — as a stopper to talks.” He then credits Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, not President Reagan, for making the deal happen.

In fact, when the United States deployed the first Pershings and GLCMS, the Soviets walked out of the Geneva arms-control negotiations. They rejected the zero-zero option out of hand, preferring instead a nuclear freeze that would have hardened in concrete the Soviet advantage of some 1800 medium-range nuclear warheads aimed at our European and Asian allies compared to zero on the U.S. and NATO side. This is the freeze Mr. Kerry supported.

Here again, the senator has it completely backward, although his description of the INF Treaty proposal matches exactly that of the Soviet Politburo. The Soviets angrily rejected the proposal, saying it was a joke. But it was the tenacious negotiating tactics of the Reagan administration, particularly at the Iceland summit, that led to the treaty’s successful conclusion in 1987.

One could, I suppose, forgive the senator’s dim knowledge of nuclear weapons and the INF if on other nuclear matters he was more informed. But his utter misunderstanding of the history of the INF simply compounded his earlier statement that we ought to elevate the problem of acid rain to that of nuclear weapons.

But less than a month later, at another hearing, Mr. Kerry proposed something that made much sense — that the president might very well have to take pre-emptive action against weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in order to forestall either their use or their proliferation. The senator began by discussing with the director of ACDA the premise that even though arms-control agreements on chemical weapons couldn’t be perfect, we nonetheless should sign such agreements. Warming to his subject, the senator urged that a “range of options” that should be available to a U.S. president “include the potential of some kind of pre-emptive action that could eliminate the capacity of Libya to further develop, similar to what happened with Iraq and the nuclear power plant with Israel.”

In a somewhat disjointed manner, the senator was urging the use of pre-emption to deal with the proliferation of WMD, and at least implicitly, endorsing the action of the Israeli government in 1981 in destroying an Iraqi nuclear reactor that had the potential of furnishing Saddam Hussein with nuclear fuel for weapons. At the time, of course, there was no sense that the Iraqi threat was imminent, yet the senator was pushing a policy of preventive action that made all the sense in the world.

But more recently, when the Iraqi weapons programs were just as serious of those in Libya in 1989, Mr. Kerry took the opposite view. Pre-emption is now bad. And now that the senator’s views have taken a marked turn for the worse, how are we to determine who is the real John Kerry?

Maybe all this can be explained by the difference between unilateral action — as practiced by Bill Clinton in Haiti or Kosovo — and “pre-emption.” But we don’t get much help from this distinction either. In 1995, during the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State-designee Madeleine Albright, Mr. Kerry strongly endorsed unilateral action as well. He said the following: “To suggest that our interests are simply a reflection of the global consensus ignores recent history. President Bush made a unilateral decision to draw the line in the sand, and he did that on the basis of American interests. Those interests required us to intervene.” Of course, the senator didn’t mention that the action he so praised — the liberation of Kuwait from the clutches of Iraq — was a unilateral military action Mr. Kerry voted against. Could part of Mr. Kerry’s problem be that he has to waffle so much in explaining his multitudinous flip-flops?

Peter Huessy is president of GeoStrategic Analysis and senior defense associate at the National Defense University Foundation.