The American Spectator

Special Report

The White House suggests John Kerry is lying when he says foreign leaders are telling him privately, "You've got to win this. You've got to beat this guy. We need a new policy." He probably isn't lying. Why wouldn't European appeasers root for a Kerry victory? He is one of them. From his days as a student at a Swiss boarding school to his 1980s "nuclear freeze" activism in Geneva, Kerry has drunk deeply from the well of continental liberalism, an ideology of appeasement which takes skeptical pride in remaining neutral between good and evil.

It is not that Kerry can't name foreign leaders who support him; it is that naming them might prove too embarrassing. The rhetorical value of his comment depended on its vagueness. If he had said, "Jacques Chirac wants me to beat Bush," the boasting would boomerang back at him.

Spanish socialists sound like they are already cheering for a Kerry victory. Spain's new pacifist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, immediately rebuked George Bush, saying "You can't bomb a people" and "you can't organize war on the basis of lies."

Zapatero needs to line up his own sophistries better. If Bush was lying when he said that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a nest for al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits with potential access to weapons of mass destruction, then why would al Qaeda need to retaliate against Spain for joining Bush in toppling a regime to which it had no ties? Why would al Qaeda consider Spain's attack on Saddam Hussein an attack on it if Bush and Jose Aznar were wrong in associating the two? If al Qaeda is bombing Spain for "collaboration with the criminal Bush and his allies," as its videotape claims, that would confirm, not deny, Bush's contention that al Qaeda identified itself at some level with Iraq under Hussein.

For a country once overrun by Moors, Spain seems particularly obtuse in its new attitude toward modern-day Moors. Zapatero is now entrusting his country's security to the peaceful instincts of Islamic terrorists. If Spain withdraws from Iraq, he implies, the country has nothing to fear from them. Did the ancient Moors invade Spain because they were "provoked"? Spain's own history is proof that militant Islam spreads without provocation, targeting westerners not for what they do or don't do but for who they are -- infidels. Militant Islam was attacking Spain centuries before the creation of the United States.

But Spain will give pacifism a try again. It is back to the nuclear-freeze neutrality that the Spanish left thought an adequate strategy against Soviet Communism -- show "faith" in an evil ideology and somehow its evil will dry up.

John Kerry, elected to the Senate with the help of a nuclear freeze PAC, subscribed to this European nuclear-freeze mentality. In 1985, he spoke at a nuclear freeze conference in Geneva where he pandered to European pacifists with the outlandish conjecture, "if it were not for the freeze movement, I am confident that the government of the United States would not be in Geneva today talking with its Soviet counterparts."

Had Kerry been in charge of devising U.S. strategy against Communism, it would still exist. His approach to Communism was as softheaded as his current approach to terrorism. Communist terrorists, like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, could count on his liberal gullibility, as when Daniel Ortega met with Kerry in Managua, promised to obey the Contadora Act for Peace and Cooperation in Central America (which Kerry dutifully recorded in the Congressional Record after he got home), and then proceeded a few days after meeting with Kerry to fly off to Moscow to pick up a $200 million check from his Soviet paymasters. As Ortega was pocketing his Soviet check, Kerry was on the Senate floor telling his colleagues that they didn't need to support the Contras since Nicaragua was free of Soviet influence. Ortega could only have chuckled as he heard Kerry's lame defense of his good faith.

"My generation, and a lot of us grew up with the phrase 'give peace a chance,' as part of a song that captured a lot of people's imagination," read Kerry's comments in the Congressional Record from 1985. "I hope that the President of the United States will give peace a chance."

When Kerry says that foreign leaders are patting him on the back and saying, "We need a new policy," this is their policy -- giving peace a chance even when confronted with those obviously not peaceful.

topics:
Islam, Iraq, Communism