Kerry’s Undeclared War

Kerry’s adversaries have found it easy to ridicule his views on foreign policy, suggesting that his idea of counterterrorism is simply to go around arresting all the terrorists. This is what Dick Cheney was getting at when he said last month that there was a danger, should Kerry be elected, that “we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war.” These barbs have some resonance, largely because Kerry is so obviously defensive about them; talking to him, you sometimes get the sense that he would gladly throw on a pair of night-vision goggles and abduct a member of his own staff if he thought it would prove he could be as tough on terror as his opponent. (When I asked one Kerry adviser what it was that voters needed to know about Kerry and terrorism, he replied without hesitation. “That he’s strong and tough,” he said. “In the case of John Kerry, unlike Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, he’s looked people in the face and shot them dead.”)
t r u t h o u t – Kerry’s Undeclared War

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