WASHINGTON — If, as Senator Teddy Kennedy rumbled recently, Iraq is President George W. Bush’s Vietnam, surely the silver-haired Senator is becoming Mr. Bush’s Jane Fonda. Of course Teddy is not as svelte as Miss Fonda, for he has never been an adept of fad diets, and an aerobics regimen could impair his precarious health. Nonetheless, Teddy is becoming the Fonda of our time. Possibly he will fly off to Falluja to be photographed on a burned out Humvee or visit Najaf to confer with the scowling Muslim cleric, the Rev. Muqtada al-Sadr. Having become so historically-minded Teddy goes on to call President Bush our era’s Richard Nixon.
Actually for this man to encourage Americans to reflect back on 1960s history is quite reckless given his blemished history. They might come across news reports of a senator leaving a girl to drown in his car while he slept off a drunk and later dialing up his high-powered advisers for urgent public relations counsel. They might also find stories of that same senator later boozing with his young nephews before their carousals ended in a rape charge. Other indelicacies have followed.
Yet, as the Senator has brought up the always-illuminating guidance of history, it might help us to understand the present war by considering the wartime leadership of a Democrat whom Senator Kennedy might admire, Franklin D. Roosevelt laboring through World War II. On second thought, Senator Kennedy might not admire FDR’s leadership against the Axis all that much. His father, Ambassador Joe Kennedy, opposed Roosevelt’s entry into the War. The Ambassador was virtually an isolationist. From our embassy in London he collaborated with some of Europe’s most slavish appeasers. In his repulsive October 19, 1938 speech commemorating the Battle of Trafalgar, Kennedy gave an appeasement stem-winder that even troubled British supporters of the doomed Munich agreement. FDR believed his Ambassador was in truth a Fascist sympathizer.
Kennedy was at least an isolationist, and so it seems his son is today. It might prove rewarding for members of the Bush Administration to review Roosevelt’s brilliant treatment of the isolationists of his day. By the time Roosevelt was finished depicting the futility and irresponsibility of their anti-war rants, he had defeated the isolationists completely. His tactic was to characterize them as Hitler’s dupes. As Roosevelt understood, by the late 1930s there was no alternative to defeating the Axis; and there is no alternative to defeating the Islamofascists today. This is a point the President cannot make too frequently. Nor should he and his surrogates shy away from characterizing their Democratic opponents as dupes.
They may not be dupes of any bellicose mullah or Middle Eastern tyrant, but they are surely dupes of what we might call the United Nations mystique. Watching Senator Kennedy and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John François Kerry, rhapsodize on the United Nations’ capacity to resolve violence in the Middle East suggests images of Neville Chamberlain praising the Munich agreement after the Germans roared into Poland — though even stubborn Chamberlain was that besotted.
The United Nations has already failed in Iraq. It does not want to be in Iraq. It is a corrupt collection of poseurs, many of whose functionaries have already been exposed as on the take from Saddam. While he was engaged in torture and aiding terrorists — for instance paying off suicide bombers in Israel — these grafters and many Europeans were cashing in on the Iraq Oil for Food Program.
There is only one course available in Iraq for civilized nations: resolve and rough treatment for any of the brutes who oppose pacification of the country. Senator Kennedy’s Vietnam parallel does not exist. The Iraqi resistance is supported at best only by the radical mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Islamofascism. They cannot summon the Communist protagonists of the Cold War from Moscow and Beijing. Moreover they have no negotiators to go off to Paris and nothing to negotiate.
President Bush’s Jane Fonda is living in a fantasy as is Senator Kerry. The other day on National Public Radio Kerry actually defended the Rev. Sadr, an outlaw accused of murdering another mullah, as a “legitimate voice” in Iraq. Then he backed off and said, “Well, let me…change the term legitimate. It belongs to a voice — because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment.” Yes, it is, and his galoots have also killed a score of American soldiers. Senators Kennedy and Kerry are not doing much to build the morale of our troops abroad, but then they played the same role thirty years ago during the Vietnam War. Now there is a historic parallel to meditate on.
