Jewish World Review March 8, 2004 / 15 Adar, 5764
Jack Kelly
Kerry's curious foreign policies
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Sen. John F. Kerry opposed famously the Vietnam war. His opposition
to that conflict was so intense that he marched in demonstrations under the
flag of the enemy, and falsely accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of
routinely committing grisly war crimes.
Kerry also opposed aid to El Salvador when that country was being attacked
by Marxist guerrillas, and aid to the Contras, who with U.S. help
ultimately freed Nicaragua from a communist dictatorship. Kerry denounced
the liberation of Grenada after a bloody Marxist coup there as "a bully's
show of force," though he says now he didn't oppose the U.S. intervention.
Kerry voted against the liberation of Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded
that country in 1990. Kerry also voted against lifting the arms embargo on
Bosnia when that country was being attacked by Serbs allied with Yugoslav
dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Though Kerry voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing the U.S. to go to war
with Iraq, he now says Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake.
In his youth, Kerry said U.S. armed forces should be placed under the
control of the United Nations. More recently, he has said the U.S. should
not have gone to war without UN permission. This record has caused some to
wonder if there could ever be a circumstance where a President Kerry would
use American military power without seeking Kofi Annan's permission first.
We now have an answer. In a meeting with the editorial board of the New York
Daily News Feb. 28, Kerry said he would have sent troops to Haiti even
without international support to quell a popular uprising against (now
deposed) President Jean Bertrand Aristide.
"I would intervene with the international community, and absent an
international force, I'd do it unilaterally," Kerry said.
A U.S. intervention to protect Aristide would have had to be unilateral,
because even the French recognized that the wildly unpopular president was
the principal cause of Haitian unrest.
"He does not belong in office. He has no legitimacy," an official in the
French foreign ministry told NewsMax Feb. 28. A day earlier, French Foreign
Minister Dominque de Villepin was pushing Aristide toward the door:
"It is for President Aristide, who bears a heavy responsibility in the
current situation, to draw the consequences of the impasse," de Villepin
told a Haitian delegation Feb. 27.
The upsurge in violence in Haiti that prompted the U.S., French and Canadian
intervention there had come mostly from thugs allied with Aristide, the
French official said.
"Aristide was trying to use (a U.S. proposed agreement to share power) to
force a contingent of international police to come to Haiti and save him
from the rebels. It would not work," the French official said.
A renegade Catholic priest turned Marxist, Aristide was elected president in
1990 in the closest thing Haiti has ever had to a fair election, but deposed
a year later in a coup led by his security chief. President Clinton sent
20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore Aristide to power.
But Aristide proved to be typical of the "one man, one vote, one time"
syndrome that has plagued the region. Re-elected in 2000 in elections
considered fraudulent by the UN and the Organization of American States,
Aristide put his thugs in charge of the police and used them to intimidate
political opponents. Much of the aid provided by the U.S. and international
organizations found its way into his pockets, and those of his cronies.
Once bound by a vow of poverty, Aristide became Haiti's richest man.
Aristide may have been democratically elected once, as Hitler was. But,
like Hitler, he was no democrat.
The wild celebrations throughout Haiti upon Aristide's departure indicate
that had we intervened militarily to prop him up, we'd have had to fight
most of the country. Yet this is the one instance where John Kerry would
unilaterally use military force.
Kerry would not intervene in Iraq to overthrow a tyrant who was a danger to
the United States. But he would intervene in Haiti to prop up a tyrant who
was an enemy of the United States. There is a depressing consistency in
this.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. Comment by clicking here.
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