Replies to post #75648 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Chris McConnel]

Thanks for posting the quote.

[Orange Trendline]

The only way you could take that quote to mean what you're saying it means is if you cut it off in the middle of it. (Which, I grant you, is the approach many news outlets took in trying to distort what Cheney was saying).

The risk he was referring to was the misguided reaction of Kerry to a possible attack, which he was absolutely spot-on about (see Kerry's comments in NY Times Magazine).

[hap0206]

seabass -- I think Cheney had in mind something very much like this -- #msg-4331935

Events didn't wait. Now convinced that America was abandoning the Middle East and no longer content to watch Iran develop a nuclear weapon that in two years would be able to hit Jerusalem, the Israelis sent a fleet of F-16s to drop bunker-busting weapons on three nuclear complexes at Bushehr, Natanz, and Arak. Rioting broke out in every Middle Eastern capital. Terrorists streamed into Baghdad from every direction. Syrian and Egyptian armies prepared for a retaliatory attack against Israel.
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and it was all downhill from there

[hap0206]

or maybe he was thinking of a scenario like this:
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From an article in today's Washington Post on John Kerry's approach to foreign policy:

Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."

So the U.N.--that club of dictators and anti-Semites--is worth dying for, but America isn't? This quote sharply summarizes why the thought of waking up two weeks from today to the news that Kerry is president-elect invokes in us a sense of utter dread.

For a concrete example of how this might play out, we turn to Park Sang-seek, a Korean "peace studies" academic, who writes (with apparent approval) in the Korea Herald:

Kerry is likely to rely on the United Nations in dealing with any future crises in Northeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula. Take a hypothetical situation in the Korean Peninsula: it is discovered that North Korea has experimented with nuclear weapons or exported nuclear materials to hostile nations or terrorist groups. Bush may make a surgical strike without consulting South Korea and the United Nations. Kerry is likely to try to solve the issue through multilateral forums, particularly the United Nations.

If North Korea gives nukes to terrorists and this is how a President Kerry responds, soldiers may not be the only Americans to die for the U.N.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, October 20, 2004 3:28 p.m. EDT

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110005784