The current attacks in Iraq are highlighting the fact that while Republicans enter this year’s election essentially united in support of the Iraq policy being pursued by President Bush, the same can’t be said for Democrats, who are deeply divided. The differences between the parties on the war are stark. Mr. Bush is determined to increase U.S. troop strength and to continue the war until victory. The Democratic Party, by contrast, has split into competing antiwar and prowar factions, with its presidential standard-bearer, Sen. John Kerry, somewhere in between.
Right now, the loudest Democrats are in the powerful antiwar faction of the party, led by Sens. Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy. Both men have likened the current war in Iraq to Vietnam. Mr. Byrd warns that sending more troops to Iraq would “only suck us deeper into the maelstrom of violence” there. Mr. Kennedy (perhaps the Senate’s strongest supporter of Mr. Kerry’s presidential candidacy), calls Iraq another Vietnam and complains that the president’s policy has created a “credibility gap” with the American people.
A second major faction in the Democratic Party says that America has an important role to play in Iraq and believes that the cut and run strategy favored by the Byrd-Kennedy faction would be a serious mistake. These include Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who says that America “will not be intimidated by barbaric acts whose only goal is to spread fear and chaos throughout Iraq.” In the case of Mr. Daschle, who has on repeated occasions denounced Mr. Bush’s performance in conducting the war on terror since September 11, his comment may reflect the fact that he faces a difficult re-election campaign in South Dakota. But other prominent Democrats, such as Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh of Indiana, have been broadly supportive of the U.S. war effort on grounds of principle.
As for Mr. Kerry, he has, true to form, managed to come down on multiple sides of the issue. In 2002, he voted for the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war to force Saddam Hussein to disarm. Last fall, however, Mr. Kerry first supported, then voted against, the appropriations bill necessary to fund the war and pay for Iraq’s reconstruction. Just two days ago, the senator suggested to one interviewer that there might be a parallel between Iraq and Vietnam. That same day, in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Mr. Kerry termed radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (who is basically a gangster with little popular support in Iraq) a “legitimate voice,” later amending that to just “a voice.”
During his NPR interview, Mr. Kerry objected to U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer’s decision to shut down Sheik al-Sadr’s newspaper for 60 days. (The paper had printed a slanderous story that coalition forces had killed Iraqi police recruits, who had actually been murdered by a terrorist car bomb.) Then Mr. Kerry compounded the situation by stating that Sheik al-Sadr has aligned himself with Hamas and Hezbollah, which he said was “sort of” a terrorist alignment.
Sort of?
A strong argument was made by Hiwa Osman on our Op-Ed page yesterday that it might have been better for Mr. Bremer to have permitted our Iraqi allies to deal with Sheik al-Sadr’s paper. But that pales in comparison with Mr. Kerry’s shameful equivocation about Hezbollah and Hamas. Mr. Kerry’s inability or unwillingness to acknowledge without reservation critical facts regarding the state of the world puts further in doubt his capacity to lead at a time of war.
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