By: The Editorial Board of The New York Sun
At this point the best thing that could happen in the
Syria crisis would be for Secretary of State Kerry to resign. He’s one
of the logical persons to take the fall for this fiasco, given that we
don’t live under a parliamentary system and the constitutional concept
in respect of the president, any president, is for the decision to be
made by voters once in four years. It was Mr. Kerry who made the blunder
that has put the administration on track for a classic appeasement.
What possessed the secretary to suggest Syria be let off the hook
after gassing its own people is beyond us. Only a day or so before Mr.
Kerry was himself warning against appeasement, though he never sounded
like he meant it. His whole public life has been a long arc
of retreat. The idea that he could suddenly emerge as a hawk, even in
the face of such a crisis as Syria, always seemed chimerical. The
proposal to let Syria off the hook in a deal with Russia is just too
cynical by half.
No doubt Mr. Kerry’s defenders will suggest that he never meant his
idea of disarming Syria to be taken seriously. If that is his defense,
the reason for him to resign would be incompetence. For the
first time since he was on a Swiftboat, he has an executive, wartime
responsibility. It’s not like a senator, where one can — indeed, one is
expected to — burble on interminably and with but indirect consequence. He now holds a job in which there isn’t room for blundering.
Another possibility is that Mr. Kerry’s offer to let Syria off the
hook wasn’t an unintended, off-hand remark, but a calculated collapse in
the face of resistance in Congress to his mini-war-plan. In that case, it would be all too typical of Mr. Kerry. We take no joy in having predicted it
in “A Moral Obscenity.” Or, for that matter, in having opposed the
elevation of Mr. Kerry to secretary of state in the first place. In any
event, if it was a premeditated demarche, resignation would also be in
order.
Yet a third possibility is that this is all part of President Obama’s
plan. This is the suggestion in an important op-ed piece by Norman
Podhoretz, issued over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal under the
headline “Obama’s Successful Foreign Policy Failure.” Mr. Podhoretz
argues that as a “left-wing radical,” Mr. Obama “believed that the
United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force
in world affairs” and has sought to transform it accordingly.
If that’s not true, then Mr. Kerry ought to resign. If it
is true, Mr. Kerry ought to resign. For millions of Americans Mr.
Kerry’s political career was poisoned at birth by his meeting with
America’s wartime enemies while our GIs were appearing in arms in
Vietnam. It was poisoned by his libels against his fellow GIs in
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he went on
to chair. A political reckoning was only a matter of time.
We had hoped that such a reckoning was accomplished in the
presidential election of 2004, when the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth
rose up and exposed Candidate Kerry as a wartime fraud. But he passed
that off as politics and returned to the Senate. It is going
to be impossible for him to pass off the current catastrophe so easily.
The administration, the country, our allies, our GIs would be better
off were Mr. Kerry now to step down and the Senate be given the chance
to consent to someone more prepared for the job once held by Jefferson,
Madison, and John Quincy Adams.
Brutal. Agreed.
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