Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2004 Pg.12

The Kerry Conundrum     In his physical bearing, John Kerry is notably Presidential, all angles and definition. It is his political profile that blurs, with shifting votes and elusive convictions. The Democratic nominee's challenge in his acceptance speech tonight is to define his political character and demonstrate that he can be trusted as commander in chief in a post-9/11 world.The Kerry campaign clearly understands this problem, because it has made "strength" and "security" the theme of its convention week. The word "strong" has been repeated so many times that it reminds us of the old joke about the politician who kept calling himself "the issues candidate" so no one would notice that he had no issues.In pitching Mr. Kerry to be commander in chief, his campaign is also stressing the personal. Just as he captained that swift boat in Vietnam, he can lead the country now in dangerous times. Americans can be confident he'll use force against our enemies because he was willing to fight (and kill) in the Mekong Delta. But because he also knows first-hand the horror of war, he will not be as "reckless" as President Bush. "Strength" and "wisdom," as Bill Clinton put it on Monday -- an alluring argument.Yet surely we all know that personal bravery is not the same as political leadership. The doubts about Mr. Kerry concern not his courage but his judgment and conviction, and have been formed as the result of public service that is far longer than his admirable four months in Vietnam. Those doubts are both political and philosophical.On the latter, Mr. Kerry has simply been wrong about the major national security questions of his time. Leaving aside the special case of Vietnam, the Senator voted against nearly every major weapons system during the Cold War. He supported the recklessly naive "nuclear freeze" in 1984. He opposed SDI, which convinced the Soviets they couldn't win an arms race. He even opposed the invasion of Grenada at the time, though he now says that is the kind of operation he would support. In other words, he was a stalwart of the dovish wing of the Democratic Party that voters refused to entrust with the Presidency from Vietnam until the Berlin Wall fell.More recently, Senator Kerry voted against the first Gulf War, arguing that diplomacy was enough to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. This vote strikes us as especially noteworthy now that Kerry supporters are trying to portray him as a foreign policy "realist" in the mold of George H.W. Bush, and in contrast to the current President. Yet when the senior Bush sought to use military force in the U.S. national interest, Mr. Kerry opposed that too.Post-9/11 this is all a political liability, and Mr. Kerry now points to Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti as examples of military actions he supported. But in political terms they were easier cases. The Democratic Party was solidly in favor, as were many conservatives, including us. The question today is whether and how Mr. Kerry would respond when the intelligence might not be certain, the costs might be high and the U.N. isn't unanimous.Mr. Kerry says that unlike Mr. Bush he'll bring the allies along in support of U.S. action, and it's tempting to believe that a new President could somehow rally the French and Germans back to our side. But this ignores our diverging strategic interests. The French want the U.N. to become a brake on the U.S. "hyperpower," and much of Europe would rather appease Islamic terror than fight it. This won't change merely because Americans elect a new President, and it would be nice to hear Mr. Kerry say he understands this.Then there is his ever-shifting views on Iraq. He voted for the war when that seemed safer politically in October 2002. But then when Howard Dean was on the march in this year's Democratic primaries, the Senator turned into a vociferous war critic and voted against the $87 billion to finish the job in Iraq. Mr. Kerry has an elaborate justification for this vote, but we agree with Senator Joe Biden, a Kerry supporter who described that vote recently to the New Yorker as "tactical" and an attempt "to prove to Dean's guys I'm not a warmonger."Now that he's won the nomination, Mr. Kerry has once again turned moderately hawkish. He assails the President's management of the war but proposes more or less the same policy. We give him credit for saying he won't withdraw abruptly from Iraq and leave a failed state, but he also leads a center-left coalition that will pressure him to do precisely that as costs rise and compete with domestic priorities. All in all, it is hard to resist the conclusion that if John Kerry had been President the last four years, Saddam would still be running Iraq.We have little doubt that a Kerry Administration would pursue Osama bin Laden to the ends of the earth. The doubts run to what he would do in the hard cases when Presidential fortitude and leadership are required. Whatever else they think of Mr. Bush, Americans know he is willing to act in our national defense. They'll be trying to judge tonight, and over the next three months, if they can depend on John Kerry to do the same.