Kerry, Vietnam and Iraq

Twenty-four-year-old Marine Michael Hoffman feels betrayed by John Kerry. Hoffman took part in the invasion of Iraq and served there for a year before returning home recently to tell Americans what he saw. "The troops aren't fighting for what Bush is espousing on TV," he says. "Basically, they're just fighting for their lives now."

Traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard, speaking at rallies for Military Families Against the War and Veterans for Peace, Hoffman sees a growing movement of dissent against Bush's Iraq folly. "The troops know it's not true that they're there because there were weapons of mass destruction or to bring democracy to Iraq," Hoffman says. Instead, as he sees it, the troops are stuck in a complex and ugly situation, with no clear mission and no way out.

In his anger and forthrightness, Hoffman sounds a lot like another young soldier who returned home from an ill-conceived war to protest against it: John Kerry. But that was back in the early 1970s. Today, Democratic Presidential candidate Kerry is singing a different tune.

In his April 18 appearance on Meet the Press, Kerry distanced himself from his younger, anti-war incarnation. Host Tim Russert showed a clip of the young Kerry in uniform, just back from Vietnam, telling of the atrocities he and his fellow soldiers had taken part in, and saying that the United States had engaged in war crimes in Vietnam. "Atrocities?" Russert asked Kerry. The candidate squirmed and tried a stiff joke, making light of his own earnest image in that early video footage: "Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me," he said, chuckling awkwardly. He went on to say that his description of burning villages and machine-gunning women and children as "war crimes" was "over the top"--just the bluster of an angry young man.

On other issues of war and peace, Kerry sounded similarly defensive and eager to portray himself as a hawk. He bobbed and weaved and qualified his way out of his eminently sensible statement that the war on terror is not primarily a military endeavor. He reminded Russert that he supported more troops in Iraq and more money for the military budget. He left no daylight at all between the Bush Administration's staunch support of Ariel Sharon's aggressive policies in the Occupied Territories and his own.

"I'm incredibly disappointed in Kerry so far," says Hoffman. "I can relate to what he was saying right after he got back from Vietnam. That's where I am right now." To this young soldier, Kerry's support for the war in Iraq "feels almost like a stab in the back."

"He's the one who said, 'No one wants to be the last man to die for a mistake,'" says Hoffman. "That's what he's asking the troops to do right now."

The worse things look in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Bush Administration's hapless "war on terror," the more the question arises: What can be done to put the genie back in the bottle? Would a Kerry Administration rein in military adventurism, and restore some sense of security to a country seemingly determined to provoke more and more resentment around the globe, making us more of a target for further terrorist attacks?

Some of candidate Kerry's statements sound encouraging. In a speech last December to the Council on Foreign Relations, Kerry said: "Simply put: The Bush Administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history." What the Administration has done in Iraq, he said, is to win a military victory, "yet make America weaker." Our "foreign policy of triumphalism," he said, "diminishes Islamic moderates and fuels the fire of jihadists."

The solutions Kerry offers sound sensible. "I will immediately convene a summit with European and world leaders to discuss a common anti-terrorism agenda," he says. He would fight back the warlords who are taking over Afghanistan and shore up the Karzai government. He would hold the Saudi royal family accountable for its support of terrorism.