JOHN KERRY now closes his presidential campaign exactly as he opened his political life: Attacking the United States military.
Thirty-three years ago, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he indicted the soldiers of Vietnam as war criminals, the heirs of Genghis Khan.
This week he embraced an already discredited account of missing munitions to attack the reputation of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne. Make no mistake, that is exactly what Kerry is doing when he asserts that deadly weapons went unsecured and unreported as these two divisions rushed to liberate Baghdad. And not just these divisions, but every officer and soldier who had a hand in drawing up the war plan. If the negligence that Kerry charges the military with was real, additional troops would not have made a difference. The initial search would still have been conducted by the 3rd I.D. and the site pronounced clear. The 101st would still have spent 24 hours in the munitions complex before moving on. Kerry cannot avoid owning the latest of many slanders he has launched at the military as a means of wounding the president.
That the story was floated by a Bush foe in the U.N. bureaucracy at the IAEA did not discourage Kerry. Nor did the evident pretzel logic of condemning the war while bemoaning the huge danger of Saddam's arsenal. The facts on the myth of the missing munitions are available at The Belmont Club and Instapundit, but facts did not matter to Kerry at
all, nor the reputations of the soldiers he charged with allowing massive amounts of deadly munitions to go missing.
John Kerry wants to be commander-in-chief, and it is on the question of who is better equipped to lead the war on global terrorism that the choice between President Bush and Senator Kerry should be made. Here we should consult the men and women who will be responding to the orders of that C-in-C.
Polls of the military show a decisive advantage for President Bush. Superb essays on the qualities necessary in a commander-in-chief are available from a retired Navy SEAL blogging at FroggyRuminations, and by an active duty soldier now stationed in Iraq and blogging at MudvilleGazette. Indeed, only the most partisan of Kerry supporters would assert that active and retired military prefer Kerry over Bush. Such a preference is only a factor in considering a vote, but it's one that should weigh more heavily in wartime.
THIS ELECTION has had a Greek Chorus--the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the POWs who testified in Stolen Honor. The mainstream media did not want to hear this chorus, even when the first volley aimed at Kerry successfully exposed his fabricated tale of a secret mission to Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968--an episode Kerry asserted on the floor of the Senate was "seared, seared" into his memory. The mainstream media has refused to question Kerry on his other accounts of incredible adventures transporting CIA men up river and running guns to anti-communist Cambodians, afraid perhaps to pull on a thread that might leave the candidate exposed as a serial fabulist. Despite the hostility, the chorus has kept chanting, this week even, pointing to meetings Kerry held in Paris with the North Vietnamese.
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