Kerry's Foreign Policy Policy

Paul Krugman's latest Times op-ed is customarily smart and pointed. Kerry's losing a historic opportunity to eviscerate a stitting president on foreign policy, traditionally the domain of incumbent commanders-in-chief. Cheney's ridiculous statements about the election - which Krugman paraphrases as "vote Bush or die" - are just the most extreme neocon position on the terror war, not the worst. The worst position is the "trust us - we know what we're doing" line of bullshit that Bush et al have been advancing since, really, 9/12/01. Bush is demonstrably losing the war against the terrorists, and it's only through extraordinary rhetorical gymnastics that he and his minions can assert the opposite. Kerry, as Krugman advocates, must attack on this point. He won't look like the callous, intellectually bankrupt Republicans did in 1944, when they attacked FDR despite the fact that his war strategy was succeeding. Rather, Kerry will look - at least to intelligent Americans - like a patriot who's concerned above all with killing those who would and did kill us: bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership. Wars are about defeating the enemy by killing him or capturing him; they're not about trumping up wholly separate wars that then elude control and enlarge the original one.