In today’s Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby points out the similarities, when it comes to foreign policy, between John Kerry and George H.W. Bush. Both, he claims, dismiss international idealism in favor of Realpolitik. He cites the words of Kerry foreign policy adviser Rand Beers, who has contended that the president’s call for democracy in Iraq is "too heroic." Jacoby continues:
But "realism" all too often results in a callous stance unworthy of the United States. It is what kept the first President Bush from publicly protesting when China’s Communist government massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square 15 years ago this week. It is what led him to send 400,000 troops to rescue Kuwait from Saddam Hussein -- and then order those troops to sit on their hands while Saddam brutally crushed a popular uprising against his murderous regime.
All of this calls to mind one of Al Gore’s campaign speeches back in 1992. "If they’re such whizzes at foreign policy," he said then, "why is Saddam Hussein thumbing his nose at the rest of the world?"
Jeff Jacoby is seconded by the unlikely source of Howard Fineman who has devined that the HW Bush has a new found affinity for Bill Clinton based on their view of going to Bagdad and the religious right.
Besides China, and Tianemen never forget the infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech in which he backed the Soviet Union against a million points of captive nation light!
As the Reaganite anti-Detentests used to say before we started calling em neocons "Pragmatism doesn’t work!"