From The Atlantic Monthly
When you run up a debt, someone eventually has to pay it. When you make a mess, someone eventually has to clean it up. When you run a company into the ground, your replacement has to not only run the company, but fix your mistakes.
We got tricked into invading and occupying another country. Like words and bullets, we can't take that back. We're there. We've done it. We've made that bed. Someone has to sleep in it. Here is some of what John Kerry has in mind.
As the situation in Iraq has worsened, Kerry has stepped up his criticism of the Bush Administration. In an April 30 speech at Westminster College, Kerry laid out a three-part plan for the occupation and reconstruction of the country. First he would expand and internationalize the security force by seeking the support of the UK, France, Russia, and China, and also NATO, which, he suggested, might take control of the borders and train Iraq's army. Second he would propose an international high commissioner to oversee elections, write a constitution, and organize the reconstruction efforts. Third he would launch a "massive training effort" to expand Iraqi security forces. Taking those steps, Kerry declared, "is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation." ... a fundamental difference in world view between Democrats and Republicans—a difference in how they see the nature of the threat facing America. This, more than any distinction between hawk and dove, is also the fundamental foreign-policy difference between Bush and Kerry.George Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States.
...The fixity of this mindset also explains why the Bush Administration spent its first months so heavily focused on the issue of national missile defense, and seemed so surprised by al-Qaeda's transnational terrorism. The Bush team didn't discount the problem of weapons of mass destruction; it simply expected trouble to come from an ICBM-wielding "rogue state" like Iraq or North Korea, rather than from Islamic terrorist groups.
Viewed through this lens, the Administration's fixation on Iraq after 9/11 becomes somewhat easier to understand.
To the Democrats in Kerry's orbit, this approach is at best inefficient and at worst akin to fighting fire with gasoline—for example, it has created terrorism in Iraq where little or none previously existed. Last fall, when I asked the presidential candidate General Wesley Clark about Feith's characterization of the threat, he said it was the "principal strategic mistake behind the Administration's policy." Clark went on, "If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they're on the periphery of international terrorism today."
