"It's absolutely impossible and irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, [Saddam] wouldn't necessarily be gone. He might be gone."

--John Kerry

SOME PEOPLE WORRY that John Kerry doesn't know what he will do once in power. But that's not the half of it. Kerry doesn't even know what he would have done had he already been in power.

Last night, Tom Brokaw gently pushed Kerry into yet another remarkable instance of utter incoherence. Brokaw, to his great credit, managed to make the key point about the "missing munitions" story that almost everyone else seems to have missed: If John Kerry had been president, no munitions would be missing in Iraq. They'd all be under the control of Saddam Hussein!

Kerry's handlers unfortunately had not prepared him for so basic a point, and the result is a new Kerryism that ranks up with there with his famous, "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Here is a segment of Brokaw's interview with Kerry on NBC News last night:

TOM BROKAW: The fact is, Senator, we still don't know what happened to those explosives. How many for sure that were there. Who might have gotten away with them. Is it unfair to the president, just as you believe he's been unfair to you, to blame him for that?

JOHN KERRY: No. It's not unfair. Because what we do know, from the commanders on the ground, is that they went there, as they marched to Baghdad. We even read stories today that they broke locks off of the doors, took photographs of materials in there. There were materials. And they left.

TOM BROKAW: The flip side of that is that if you had been President, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Because you--

JOHN KERRY: Not necessarily at all.

TOM BROKAW: But you have said you wouldn't go to war against him?

JOHN KERRY: That's not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons.

TOM BROKAW: But he wasn't destroying them.

JOHN KERRY: And we would--but that's what you--have inspectors for. And that's why I voted for the threat of force. Because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It's absolutely impossible and irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn't necessarily be gone. He might be gone. Because if he hadn't complied, we might have had to go to war. And we might have gone to war. But if we did, I'll tell you this, Tom. We'd have gone to war with allies in a way that the American people weren't carrying the burden and the entire world understood why we were doing it. [emphasis added]

The fact of the matter is that if John Kerry had been president Saddam Hussein would not have been gone, and would have been doing as he pleased not just with the 380 tons of explosives Kerry now seems to be so concerned about, but also with the 400,000 of tons of munitions U.S. forces have already destroyed in Iraq.

Furthermore, if Kerry becomes president one cannot have confidence that he will stay the course in Iraq. Yesterday, Kerry compared Iraq to the Bay of Pigs, and praised President Kennedy for acknowledging "the mistakes he made" in trying to remove Castro. So Kerry believes that the Iraq war is a "mistake." It's very hard to believe, then, that he would be willing to fight it through to victory.

William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard.

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