John Kerry: Still Wrong After All These Years

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Daniel Greenfield

A year and a half before Osama bin Laden was found living in a compound at the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment, Senator John Kerry was celebrating the passage of the “Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act,” also known as the Kerry-Lugar Pakistan Bill. Under either name, Kerry was offering a rather sizable giveaway to a government that had a long history of ties to the Islamic terrorists that the United States was fighting.

Kerry, along with the bill’s co-sponsors, issued an explanatory statement to clarify why they would be directing 1.5 billion dollars a year over five years to a state sponsor of terrorism.

“The core intent of the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act is to demonstrate the American people’s long-term commitment to the people of Pakistan. The United States values its friendship with the Pakistani people and honors the great sacrifices made by Pakistani security forces in the fight against extremism…  There are no conditions on Pakistan attached to the authorization of $7.5 billion in non-military aid.”

A year and a half later, after the Bin Laden raid, the man whom Pakistan’s top diplomat in D.C. described as a “steadfast friend of Pakistan” was sent once again as an envoy to the terrorist state. It was not the first time in his long career that Kerry had been dispatched to make nice with an enemy of the United States.

In 1971, 40 years before he flew off to Pakistan, Kerry had headed the Vietnam Veterans Against the War delegation that met with the Viet Cong in Paris. It was the first time that the future senator, presidential candidate and Secretary of State would meet with enemy leaders. It would not be the last.

Over the next forty years Kerry would reinvent himself numerous times, transforming from an anti-war activist disgusted by the uniform to a war hero reporting for duty as he sought to corner both sides of the market, but his flirtation with tyrants and tyrannies, particularly those hostile to the United States, never changed.

The murderous Viet Cong gave way to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Ho Chi Minh gave way to Assad. Vietnam gave way to Pakistan. But at no point during those long 40 years, a biblical number often linked to transformation and change, did John Forbes Kerry learn anything at all from his countless mistakes.

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Kerry had hardly managed to win his first term in the Senate when he was back on a plane, this time to Nicaragua for a meeting with another Communist terrorist group. The Sandinista anthem called the “Yankee” the enemy of mankind and a year before Kerry’s visit, Daniel Ortega had threatened the United States with war while crowds of his supporters had chanted, “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”

The Sandinistas had ethnically cleansed the Miskito Afro-Indians and destroyed Nicaragua’s Jewish community. But none of that deterred Kerry from shaking hands with Ortega and urging Reagan to make a deal with him.

“We negotiated with North Vietnam… they just want to get rid of them [the Sandinistas], they want to throw them out, they don’t want to talk to them,” Kerry whined. And Kerry did want to talk them. To the Viet Cong, to the Sandinistas and to anyone else who hated the United States and wished us harm.

Of FARC, the Colombian Marxist Narcoterrorist group, Kerry said that they had “legitimate complaints.” When it came to Cuba, Kerry killed democracy funding for the island just last year and complained that the United States clings to a Cuba “policy that has manifestly failed for nearly 50 years.” By that Kerry meant the Castro embargo, which he had steadily opposed for as long as he had been in the Senate.

But Kerry wasn’t just wrong when it came to Latin American Marxists; he was equally wrong in the Middle East.

In 2009, Kerry visited Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and described Syria as “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.” Kerry’s visits to Syria and gushing about Assad grew so torrid that even the Washington Post described him as a “prominent admirer” of Assad.

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Last year at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kerry bragged about his close relationship with Assad and gushed, “Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and the economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”

But then Kerry had a long history of getting the Middle East wrong, of supporting tyrants and terrorists.

Two years ago, Kerry wrote a letter of support for Code Pink activists bound on a mission of support for Hamas. “My staff has met with members of the group and is impressed with their ability, dedication and commitment to the peace process.“  The letter was used to allow a political march from Egypt into Gaza and a meeting with Hamas leaders.

And there’s Iraq, an enduring part of the Kerry legend, because in few places did Senator Kerry get it as wrong, as often, as he did in Iraq. While it’s famously believed that Kerry flip-flopped once on Iraq, going from pro-war to anti-war, he actually shifted gears and directions a dizzying number of times.

Before the original Gulf War, Kerry urged Bush I to give Saddam Hussein room to back off, negotiating an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in exchange for allowing Iraq to make a claim on some Kuwaiti territory and proposing some Israeli concessions as well. He claimed that threatening Saddam “stiffened Iraq’s resolve and weakened America’s.”

After the war, Kerry turned into a hawk, saying of Bush that, “The administration has basically sided with Saddam Hussein” and demanded that Saddam be tried for environmental terrorism. During the Clinton Administration, Kerry called for using ground troops to force Saddam out of power. It was no surprise at all when during the Bush Administration, Kerry flipped in reverse, going from a strong supporter of the war to a strong opponent of it.

In the spring of last year, Senator Kerry met with Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s new tyrant in Egypt, and said that, “in our discussions, Mr. Morsi committed to protecting fundamental freedoms, including women’s rights, minority rights, the right to free expression and assembly.”

Six months later, Morsi’s thugs were beating political opponents in the street and ‘Always Wrong’ Kerry had another notch in his belt.

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry had asked during his Senate testimony, and throughout his decades in the Senate, with the power of the same committee that he had once testified before behind him, he had done his best to see to it that Americans and people from all nations would die for his mistakes.