Before Obama, there was Kerry

As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, John Kerry proposed almost exactly the same approach to Islam that Obama has actually carried out as president, namely that diplomacy, not relying on our own power and force but instead showing the Muslims that we are not mean to them, would win them over to our side. I eviscerated his ideas in an October 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “Kerry’s Ideal: Appeasement.” Here’s the beginning of the piece:

What is the one thing that animates the tree-like Senator from Massachusetts? The answer, in a word, is appeasement. Of course, that is not the word used by Kerry or by Matt Bai, author of a revelatory profile of the senator in the New York Times Magazine. The word they both use is diplomacy, which, Bai tells us, is Kerry’s panacea for all problems. “The only time I saw Kerry truly animated during two hours of conversation,” Bai writes [emphasis added], was when Kerry talked about his ability to build releationships with foreign leaders, particularly Muslim leaders:

We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days.

Here is another excerpt from my article:

Kerry’s animating faith in diplomacy is for him a kind of religious faith, with its own god, international coalition building, and its own devil, American autonomy and assertiveness. As an orthodox believer in this left-liberal religion, Kerry sees any manifestation of American strength as evil and despicable, and diplomacy as its virtuous opposite. Diplomacy is the way to tie up and hamstring “arrogant” America and subordinate its wildness to civilized norms as embodied in the UN and certain European governments.

And another:

If it were true that merely “doing good” for Muslims could win their affection, wouldn’t our rescue of Kuwait in the Gulf War; wouldn’t our support for the Muslim Kosovars against the Christian Serbs; wouldn’t our massive aid to the starving Somalians; wouldn’t our exhaustive involvement with the Mideast “peace process” and our government’s support for a Palestinian state; wouldn’t our openness to Muslim immigration and our multicultural welcoming of Islam in our country; wouldn’t our vast efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq as free nations—wouldn’t any of these good deeds have won Muslim hearts and minds? Anyone who still believes at this point that Muslims’ hostility toward America can be assuaged by our being “nice” to them is stuck in a Jimmy Carter version of Ground Hog Day, eternally kissing Leonid Brezhnev on the cheek just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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James P. writes:

You wrote,

John Kerry proposed almost exactly the same approach to Islam that Obama has actually carried out as president, namely that diplomacy, not relying on our own power and force but instead showing the Muslims that we are not mean to them, would win them over to our side.

Not quite. The Obama approach is the same as the Bush approach—namely, there are a small number of bad, extremist Muslims, whom we must kill with robots, and whom we must strictly differentiate from the vast majority of good, moderate Muslims.

Both Bush and Obama believed in appeasing the good, moderate Muslims and thus winning them over to our side.

Both Obama and Bush acted on the belief that “democracy” would cause the good, moderate Muslims to rally to our side.

It is hard to imagine that Kerry, if elected, would not have used “power and force” against the bad Muslims, just as Obama and Bush did, while truckling to the good Muslims, just as Obama and Bush did.

It is hard to imagine that Romney, if elected, will do anything differently from Obama and Bush.

Given the ideological fixations of our foreign policy elite, the policy is practically predetermined regardless of who is president.

Cyril Y. writes:

You quote Kerry:

“We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days.”

Kerry would have us believe that there is no impulse to colonize, to conquer, and to subjugate the “other,” residing within the collective consciousness of the greater Islamic nation. He would have us believe that Islamic history is one of “liberation” rather than gross imperialism and concomitant exploitation of the subjugated non-Muslim natives, that Muslims do not venerate Islamic conquerors and holy-warriors when they in fact do so openly and unapologetically, and he would vehemently deny the well-documented fact that Islamic jurisprudence contains comprehensive exhortations to expand the domain of Islamic rule by force until it encompasses the entire world.

So much for Kerry’s incredible intellect.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 05, 2012 03:14 PM | Send