A telling line …
[Kerry] refuses to acknowledge progress, or praise the growing democratic spirit in Iraq. He has not made democracy a priority of his foreign policy. But what is his strategy, his vision, his answer? Is he content to watch and wait, as anger and resentment grow for more decades in the Middle East, feeding more terrorism until radicals without conscience gain the weapons to kill without limit?
This is a passage from the <$Ad$>president’s ‘major address’ on foreign policy today. And statements such as these are the ones that take us beyond mere lying, which the president’s campaign is doing so much of today, to a more fatal and willful myopia.
Kerry will “watch and wait, as anger and resentment grow” in the Middle East?
Does the president think we’re in the bubble with him?
Let me first stipulate that I have long thought and continue to believe that, setting the issue of methods and modalities aside, liberalization in the Middle East is a key strategic interest of the United States. But if anger and resentment is your issue, who cannot see that on this point, with his methods and modalities, President Bush has sown the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind?
You might argue that bottled up emotions pale in comparison to force and power. But if you are making the argument about hearts-and-minds, who denies that by every measure, both empirical and impressionistic, President Bush has conjured these passions almost more than all before him combined? The rhetoric has truly achieved lift-off from the facts.
This is grand strategy by vacant syllogism and cliche. It gives a new meaning to sound and fury signifying nothing.
