An Open Letter to John Kerry-It’s not us

Every few years a messiah arrives in Jerusalem, shakes hands, makes demands and promises to make peace in our time. Then when the whole thing blows up in his face, he throws up his hands and flies back blaming the ungrateful Jews for not embracing his vision.

So many false messiahs have come before you, squinting against the bright sunshine, pounding the table at meetings, downing martinis and fantasizing about the Nobel Peace Prize that they were sure was waiting for them at the end.

Did you really think you would be any different? Were you so delusional that you imagined you could succeed where career diplomats with a lifetime of experience in the region had failed?

It’s not as if you had a good track record negotiating anything. Do you remember meeting Madame Binh in Paris? What about carrying Daniel Ortega’s peace offer after assuring everyone that he wasn’t a Communist? Right before he flew to Moscow. And let’s not gloss over your visit to Assad. Was that peace in the air or was it just the nerve gas?

I know you don’t have time to remember all your diplomatic triumphs. Or like Hillary, any of them.

You went to Paris to aid the Viet Cong. You went to Nicaragua to aid the FSLN terrorists. You went to Israel to aid the PLO. The USSR fell, but your old nostalgia for Communist guerrillas and killers hasn’t deserted you. It’s why you failed. And it’s why you’ll fail over and over again.

No matter what the PLO did, you blamed Israel. Just as no matter what the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas did, you blamed America.

The PLO can call for Israel’s destruction, champion terrorism and ally with Hamas, but your minions will still provide anonymous quotes saying that the PLO can’t be expected to negotiate while Israel possibly considers building houses in Jerusalem.

Israel is expected to free terrorists who murder elderly Holocaust survivors, but the delicate sensibilities of PLO terrorists are outraged whenever a Jewish family that they haven’t managed to murder yet moves into a home in Jerusalem.

Good negotiators can put their sympathies aside to achieve their goals. But no matter how many press releases you put out touting your special relationship with Israel, a relationship almost as special as the one your fellow Massachusetts senator had with a girl in a ‘67 Oldsmobile whose drowned corpse turned up the next day, you spoil it by threatening another intifada or calling Israel an Apartheid state.

You show up to provide moral support to the murderers and go home as their useful idiot. That was the pitiful function you served in Paris, in Nicaragua and in Israel. The only thing you ever did with your unsolicited interventions was make things worse. Your anti-war activism helped polarize a nation. Your Ortega intervention emboldened a terrorist group. And your peace initiative led to a unity agreement with Hamas.

After almost half a century, the only thing you ever do is make things worse. Any man with a scrap of decency looking back on a lifetime of diplomatic wreckage would have retired. Instead you finagled your way into becoming Secretary of State so you could fail on a grander scale.

The secret to your success as a lifelong failure is refusing to accept responsibility. You just throw someone else’s medals over the fence and blame someone else for your latest fiasco.

You told the Senate that the negotiations between Israel and the PLO broke down because the Jewish State didn’t release the latest set of murderers on time. There was no acknowledgement that Israel should not have been expected to release the murderers of civilians, including an elderly Holocaust survivor.

After releasing three sets of murderers, in exchange for nothing except the PLO showing up and continuing to make more demands, you decided that Israel was to blame because the fourth set of murderers wasn’t released on time.

And let’s not forget the popular “settlements” excuse. The settlement in question is Jerusalem; one of the oldest cities in the world. A city whose unity as the capital of Israel you endorsed on numerous occasions.

You cosponsored the Jerusalem Embassy Act which stated that the policy of the United States is that, “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city” and “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel”. You cosponsored Senate Consecutive Resolution 113 stating that “Jerusalem must remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected as they have been by Israel during the past twenty-five years.”

How about Resolution 106 or Resolution 21 which ”Calls upon the President and the Secretary of State to publicly affirm as a matter of U.S. policy that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel.” Or 1323 and 1322?

You co-sponsored all of them. Were you obstructing peace all these decades? Or are you obstructing peace now by turning your back on them?

You also co-sponsored Resolution 46 stating that the modern State of Israel is “the outgrowth of the existence of the historic Kingdom of Israel established three thousand years ago in the city of Jerusalem and in the land of Israel.”

You co-sponsored Resolution 522 with the same text in 2008. But that was a long 6 years ago.

During your presidential campaign, you released a paper in which you called Jerusalem, “Israel’s indisputable capital.” Now you’re disputing it.

“As President, John Kerry will never force Israel to make concessions that compromise its security,” the paper said. “As President, John Kerry would not expect Israel to negotiate without a credible Palestinian partner for peace – something that unfortunately does not exist today.”

But you’re not President so you can’t be blamed for completely reversing those positions and insisting that Israel make concessions that compromise its security and negotiate with terrorists who sabotage every one of your futile attempts at peace negotiations. And then you stop by the Trilateral Commission and suggest, off the record, that Israel is becoming an Apartheid state.

Now you’re off sulking and plotting to unveil your peace plan which will gut Israel, carve up Jerusalem and give the PLO everything without obligating it to anything. But the terrorists you’re helping will sabotage it just like they sabotaged your peace negotiations, just like Daniel Ortega sabotaged your peace offer and just like the Viet Cong destroyed the credibility of their useful idiots.

Your Senate career is over; you hooked your dying star to a falling president and put your legacy in the hands of greasy killers who would sell their sister for a monopoly on American cigarettes. You would have been better off turning over Teresa’s money to Bernie Madoff and going to Afghanistan to negotiate in person with the Taliban.

Even while you’re warning Israel that it will be destroyed if it doesn’t listen to you, you have destroyed yourself. Had you retired from the Senate, you might have left with some dignity. Instead you will be a failed footnote in a failed administration.

It’s a fitting fate for a man who worked to see his country fail to end his time as a miserable failure.

Whether it’s Ukraine, Syria or Israel, you have failed. And Japan and Korea are still coming up. Have another drink. Fly to another conference. Closet yourself with your advisers and rant about Israel. And when you do leave, you will blame those ungrateful Jews who wouldn’t do what you told them to.

But John, we weren’t the ones who did this to you. You did it to yourself. You can blame Israel all you like, but it’s not us. It’s you.

Iconoclast.ca | Thursday, February 26, 2004

When John Kerry Slandered Me

Not too long ago, Senator John Kerry made a remarkable demand in an early political season for remarkable statements: Senator Kerry Challenges President Bush to Debate on Vietnam Service.

Flashback: Thirty-three years ago, in April, 1971, John Kerry and I had important months. In April, 1971, I was in the first month of my second deployment to Vietnam with the US Navy. That month my logbook shows 69.7 flight hours. That month my crew and I flew ten missions in support of Operation Market Time. On these flights we flew our unarmed P-3B airplane on "tracks" - flight paths during which we descended to within 200 feet of the water and, after fixing the contact's position, speed, and course, took multiple photo runs to record a ship's on-deck cargo, electronics, and weaponry. Sometimes the contacts turned out to be neutral freighters or US warships. Sometimes they turned out to be Soviet bloc ships or our primary targets, Chinese or North Vietnamese ships trying to sneak weapons into South Vietnam with which to arm the enemy. When we came across such a ship, sometimes they tried to shoot us down. We had nothing with which to shoot back since Secretary of Defense McNamara had prohibited us from carrying any weapons of self-defense (even pistols for our survival vests) in an attempt to appease the enemy and "facilitate the peace talks."

April, 1971, was also a big month for Former-Lieutenant John Kerry, who had recently resigned his commission so as to be able to brand my shipmates and me monsters. During the so-called "Winter Soldier Investigation" hearings before Congress, Kerry said:

"I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

"They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

"We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out?"

Congress, to its everlasting shame, demanded no proof of these allegations, but let them fester in the then-political atmosphere of running as fast as we could to abandon our allies in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Subsequent writings, by high-ranking communist officials and generals, forthrightly thank Mr. Kerry for helping them achieve their subsequent military victory in Vietnam and realize the deaths of at least two-and-a-half million of their own people who were deemed "unnecessary" for the future (not to mention the later repudiation of these allegations by many respected historical researchers).

Fast Forward to the Present: Today, to add further insult to injury, Sen. Kerry harps upon his curiously brief service in Vietnam while assiduously censoring any mention of his activities afterwards in which he blood-libeled my shipmates.

Further, every day, Michael Moore and Kerry's other surrogates screech that President Bush "dodged the draft" by joining the National Guard and that he "deserted" from the Guard because 30+-year-old Guard records are incomplete (thereby demonstrating their ongoing total ignorance of the military and the vicissitudes of military paperwork).

Sen. Kerry has also demonstrated an utter lack of shame in scolding George W. Bush for bring up the subject of Viet Nam, when the President was questioned by reporters about his military service. Mr. Kerry dragged Vietnam into this campaign and now whines that somehow George W. Bush is at fault for bringing up the subject and trying to defend himself.

My shipmates and I served honorably in Vietnam and returned home, almost to a man, to resume normal lives, start families and businesses, get civilian jobs, pursue further education...all the normal stuff that veterans have been doing since after the Revolutionary War. That Mr. Kerry, a former naval officer and fellow Vietnam veteran, would say such things about us remains an indelible stain upon his name and honor.

Mr. Kerry has disgraced himself, by action and word, showing the whole world that he is foremost a career minded, self-centered opportunist, abetted by situational morality and driven by a lust for personal fortune at any cost. If he had any sense of honor, he would not attack President. Bush, but instead apologize to my shipmates, the rest of the US armed forces, and then to the American public, for they deserve far better than anything this stained, pitiful man has to offer.

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Apparently you were for a united Jerusalem… before you were against it.