Democratic frontrunner ... will be stronger “war president” than Bush

[Aidoneus]

subject header slightly shortened due to length restrictions..

Democratic frontrunner declares he will be stronger “war president” than Bush
By Patrick Martin
2 March 2004

In a speech Friday in Los Angeles, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the likely presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, attacked the Bush administration’s management of the “war on terror” and declared that he would be a more effective—and more aggressive —“war president.”

The bulk of Kerry’s criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign and military policy was from the right, not the left, a clear indication of the type of campaign the Democratic Party will wage for the November election. He referred disparagingly to “armchair hawks” in the Pentagon and White House, implicitly contrasting the lack of personal experience in warfare on the part of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz with his own experience as a Vietnam combat veteran.

“I don’t fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror,” Kerry said. “I believe he has done too little.... George Bush has no comprehensive strategy for victory in the war on terror—only an ad hoc strategy to keep our enemies at bay. If I am commander in chief, I would wage that war by putting in place a strategy to win it.”

In language essentially identical to that of Bush, he declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden would not mean an end to the conflict. “We don’t just face one man or one terrorist group,” he said. “We face a global jihadist movement of many groups, from different sources, with different agendas, but all committed to assaulting the United States and open and free societies around the globe.”

Kerry thus embraced the Bush administration’s main pretext for its militarist foreign policy as well as its domestic attacks on democratic rights and social spending: the assertion that a state of war exists—of indefinite duration, and against largely unidentified or yet-to-be-named terrorist enemies—and that, as a “war president,” the commander in chief must be granted extraordinary powers.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/kerr-m02.shtml

[Aidoneus]

1. ah, sorry for the dupe..

didn't realize DTF did this first. Either he was just anticipating that I would and deliberately plotted against me in advance, or I was too lazy for only checking half the page for a duplicate before posting..