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Printer-Friendly Version A Vote for Senator Kerry Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients From: Jude Wanniski Re: Making Up My Mind There are a lot of little reasons why I should be voting for the re-elect ion of President Bush, for whom I gladly cast my vote in 2000. The one b ig reason why I will vote for Senator Kerry next Tuesday is that he is a n internationalist, as am I, and Mr Bush has become an imperialist one whose decisions as Commander-in-chief have made the world a more dangero us place. Until this week, while I had privately decided to vote for Ker ry, I had not planned to share that news with you until after Election D ay. But I have been getting lots of mail from website fans urging me to vote for Kerry, or to help them decide between Kerry and Nader. Or from my Wall Street clients urging me to vote for Bush for all the little rea sons economic, social or political of the kind that led me to the Republ ican Party in 1968 after my early adult years as a Democrat. A week ago, my old friend Pat Buchanan endorsed the Presidents re-electio n in his American Conservative magazine, entitled Coming Home. I told hi m his column was well-reasoned and beautifully written, but I could not agree with his argument that conservatives should not vote against Mr B ush in order to punish him for Iraq because they would only be punishing America. The fact is, while neither Pat nor I consider ourselves imperi alists, I actually believe in the international institutions that were d esigned in the last year of World War II, with the United Nations at the core, and he does not seem to trust them at all. As an America First nationalist, Pat is an Old Guard Republican who vehem ently opposed the war in Iraq because he never believed Baghdad was an i mminent threat to our homeland. My opposition was based on the convictio n that Saddam Hussein had been rendered powerless as a threat to the reg ion, that he had been disarmed and could be kept that way by the United Nations inspections regime -- and that the goal of Team Bush had from th e start been an imperialist one. Yes, the United States is at the pinnac le of world power and has great responsibilities to be the manager of wo rld affairs. Ive never believed in the neo-con Project for a New America n Centurys concept of directing that power at preventing another country from replacing the US at the top of the heap. The very idea is a dark one, I think, even sinister, far more insular than Pat Buchanans nation alism. It conveys to the world that we are going to do what we wish and need not even explain our motives -- because we have the power to do so. If there is anything Ive learned about Senator Kerry in this campaign, it is that he is an internationalist who believes in hearing out and takin g seriously the opinions of the other countries of the world. When he sa ys that if he had been President, we would not have gone to war with Ira q, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he is telling the tr uth. And it would not have been because the UN Security Council would not have given him a permission slip, but because the rest of the world could plainly see that the diplomacy of the UN was working, that UNMOV IC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had concluded there were no existing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no WMD program s in operation. If Saddam Hussein had shown any resistance, Mr Bush wou ld have gotten the UNSC resolution he wanted and Senator Kerry would not now be able to make the case that the war was a great mistake. At the outset, I said I decided this week that Mr Bush had made the worl d a more dangerous place with his unilateral decisions, I had to add in the news that came from the IAEA about the disappearance of 380 tons of weapons from a cache 30 miles from Baghdad. Senator Kerry has sharply cr iticized President Bush for not securing this arms depot from looters. V ice President Cheney responded by pointing out that since the war ended, 400,000 tons of weapons have been destroyed. Cheney misses the point, a nd in a way so has Mr Kerry, by saying the missing explosives no doubt have been used to kill American troops with roadside bombs. The reason t he IAEA got involved in the 380 tons and not the other 400,000 is that t he small cache contained explosives capable of setting off nuclear weapo ns. When President Bush 18 months ago indicated he no longer trusted the IAEA inspection regime and would have our forces disarm Saddam, the IAEA ins pectors left Iraq and have not returned since. As soon as the war formal ly ended last year, the IAEA asked US permission to return to secure t hose sites that contained dual-use materials that could be used for WMD purposes. The Al Qaqaa site near Baghdad was one of them, containing HMX and RDX explosives of the type a terrorist would have to have in order to set off a nuke in an attack. As Gordon Prather explained to me when h e learned of the missing explosives: If a terrorist group were to get th eir hands on 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, it would be relative ly easy for them to make a nuke of Hiroshima power. They could, say, loa d it into a truck and cart it into Washington on Inauguration Day. But w ithout HMX or RDX, they could not detonate the nuke, and it would be imp ossible for terrorists to make the explosives suitable for the triggerin g device on their own. What Prather fears is that Iraqi scientists had already cast some of the HMX into the lenses needed in such a device, lenses the IAEA had under i ts control and seal, and that these are now loose in the region. Can you imagine, the IAEA had nuclear materials in Iraq under seal dating back to the 1970s and none of the seals were broken even during the Gulf War. It was our responsibility to secure those sites as soon as we went in a nd instead looters have carted them off. By this time, with one revelation after another of the mismanagement of f oreign policy and national security under President Bush, Id hoped he wo uld find a way to signal the electorate that things would be different i n a second term; It would have meant Dick Cheneys replacement with a GOP internationalist. It would also have meant a clean sweep of the neo-cons who cooked up the war -- and who misled a President who did not have the experience to be able to figure out he had been manipulated into realizing their imperia l fantasies. Sadly, there is no indication a second term would be any di fferent than a first, as all the speculation we read on personnel still has Cheney in the drivers seat with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Donal d Rumsfeld readily at hand. Because Mr Bush has told us repeatedly about how he is strengthened by h is faith in God, with that faith sustaining him through his tough decisi ons, it goes without saying that it he is re-elected he will be filled w ith the spirit of vindication. There not only would be no changes in the teams view of how the world must be dealt with. There would also be les s restraint in George W Bush's willingness to shape the world to his di vinely inspired vision. Ill still vote Republican for the rest of the ballot on Tuesday, where I find the smaller issues more to my taste in the GOP But I will cast m y first vote for the Democrat in a presidential contest since I pulled t he lever for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And I will do so with enthusiasm fo r the Senator's views on how to manage the world, having come to appreci ate the way his mind works. If he does win, he will have a Republican House and probably a Republica n Senate to work with, finding acceptable common ground on important dom estic issues. But most of all, I think he will little by little make the world a less dangerous place than it has become these last four years.
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