John Kerry, when he first ran for elective office in 1970, told the Harvard Crimson that he was an "internationalist" who felt that the UN should retain command of the US military:

“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.” Kerry said he wanted “to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care.”

The Kerry campaign, celebrating primary victories in Virginia and Tennessee last night, declined to comment on the senator’s remarks. As a candidate for president, Kerry has said he supports the autonomy of the U.S. military and has never called for a scale-back of CIA operations.

When a candidate takes elective office, they swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Nowhere in that document does it allow any entity except the President and Congress to control or restrain American armed forces. John Kerry comes from a radical-left group of thinkers who believed -- and still do -- that the only way for the world to get along is for everyone to cede sovereignty to the UN, despite the fact that not only does the UN not uphold democratic ideals, but it puts nations like Libya and Syria in charge of committes on human-rights abuses and counter-terrorism.

One may be tempted to say that this was all just youthful idealism that has long since matured, except that Kerry keeps returning to these first principles in his legislative career, and sometimes goes past even that. In 1991, despite UNSC approval, Kerry voted against taking military action to eject Saddam from Kuwait, although he says now that he was in favor of action -- just not at that point. He voted for action in 2002 but has backpedaled furiously from that vote ever since Howard Dean entered the race, claiming he meant for Bush to get a permission slip from the UNSC prior to taking any action. And despite what his campaign claims, Kerry has repeated attempted to gut the CIA by stripping it of funding. Power Line noted back in July 2003:

Kerry, whose involvement in politics arose out of his virulent opposition to the Vietnam War, said at the beginning of his career that he would like to "almost eliminate CIA activity." This might be defended as a youthful indiscretion, except that throughout his career in the Senate, Kerry has acted in a manner consistent with those early sentiments. In 1994 he tried to cut $1 billion from the intelligence agencies' budgets. In 1995 Kerry offered legislation to "reduce the intelligence budget by $300 million" in each of the fiscal years 1996 to 2000. His bill never made it to the floor.

In the face of Kerry's lifelong antagonism to the intelligence community, his preaching about intelligence failures and gaps of knowledge are crassly hypocritical. Kerry's record reveals him to be just as much of an internationalist as he was when he tossed someone else's medals over the White House fence; the only aspect of Kerry that has improved is his opportunism. His recipe of appeasement and forensics in securing America, while emasculating the CIA and ceding military sovereignty to the anti-democratic majority at the UN, will bring disastrous results if he is elected.

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» Youthful idealism or dangerous trend? from Zygote-Design
The Captain weighs in on the John Kerry interview from 1970 that's been making the rounds in which Kerry calls himself an internationalist that would see U.S. troops under the control of the United Nations. Cap says Kerry hasn't swayed... [Read More]

Tracked on February 11, 2004 3:14 PM