Running on honor that he earned in war decades before he vilified the work of himself and his colleagues — and then exemplified the careerist, accommodationist, political collaborator — Democratic presidential candidate and nominee-to-be John Kerry will address the nation tonight and make the single, uninterrupted and unabbreviated appeal for his ascension to leadership of the United States of America. We are told that he will lead a "smarter" war, one that brings "traditional allies" back into the fold of American policy and that as Commander-in-Chief, he will never "hesitate to use force when it is required." He will be as strong as the president — even stronger.

But like the man who runs a never-ending shell game — presenting a different side of an issue, sometimes with calculation and sometimes with sheer arbitration, who for many months has substituted the persona of a decorated war hero back from the front for his long and well-known, dovish Congressional history — the words and gestures that John Kerry will offer tonight and every night until November 2nd conflict with the platform of the very political party that will coronate him tonight. The Democratic National Committee has released for the convention in Boston a forty-one-page manifesto that, while of the party and not officially the presidential ticket, bears the same title as that of John Kerry's campaign, "Stronger at Home and Respected in the World."

Via Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, Amir Taheri has read the document and is, if characteristically phlegmatic, grave about its implications for both the Democratic Party and candidate Kerry. He begins with a preface:

Ever since Senator John F Kerry emerged as the Democrat Party's presumptive presidential nominee last spring, his Republican opponents have been accusing him of harbouring the dream of restoring the Clinton era.

The Democrat Party's platform document, "Strong At Home, Respected In The World", however, envisages a Kerry presidency that would more resemble Jimmy Carter's rather than Bill Clinton — at least in foreign policy.

Taheri draws the distinctions clearly, if anathematically to the purposes of Democrats trying to keep them trifling (emphasis my own):

The Kerry foreign policy would be different from that of Bush in at least three areas:

Under Kerry, the US would forswear the right of pre-emptive action against its foes. It will employ its military only in a multilateral context, with the consent of the United Nations. Such a policy would give the UN and the allies, who are not identified, a veto on the use of force by the US. It also means that the US will act only after it is attacked, and not to prevent attack on itself or its allies.

...The US should have waited until after an attack from Iraq before reacting. Call it the Pearl Harbor Doctrine, if you like, but, if adopted, it would offer insurance to such regimes as North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Pyongyang and Tehran would know that, short of attacking the US directly, they should fear no military retaliation.

A Kerry administration would abandon Bush's commitment to promoting democracy, including by military pressure and/or action. Instead, the US will adopt the "soft power" method, using public diplomacy, battle of ideas, education, development aid, and human rights. (Here, the document echoes themes developed by Carter in 1976 .) The document says a Kerry presidency will help "sustain voices of freedom against repressive regimes. The word "sustain", used to avoid "support", is, meaningless in this context, while the label "repressive regimes", instead of "anti-democratic regimes", is unfortunate.

In the war against terror, Kerry would put the emphasis on measures that the US and its allies must take within their realm rather than impose on others. This means police cooperation among the 60 countries with active terrorist cells. The US will orchestrate the freezing of terrorist assets and the closing of terrorist channels of communication.

The problem, however, is that one man's terrorist is often someone else's "freedom fighter". For example, Syria and Iran will never admit that the Hezballah is a terrorist organization and almost all Arab states refuse to label Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist. There are also thousands of front organizations- charities, and NGOs, enjoying high patronage in their respective countries, part or all of whose activities could be regarded as terrorist.

Perhaps the one exception to the Democratic yearning for difference with President Bush is the desire for John Kerry to not be seen as the ugly American, the cowboy, the headstrong ruffian. Therein lies a danger: the concepts in this charter are the Eastern dandy's foray into the wild west, the use of gentleman's rules and business etiquette with those for whom there is not even the simplest form of human dignity.

We should all know that France does not share our cultural, political or ethical values. The government chosen by the people's majority has always enjoyed friendly commercial ties to horrifying dictatorships like Iraq, Iran, Sudan and North Korea. Perhaps the country will choose a different direction; a rekindling of the ideals both American and Frenchman share. But until then, they are the worst example of to what the United States should submit itself.

The terrorist influx in Iraq, Islamists working with Ba'athists, has proven many things but above all that the world's strongest military will need to work carefully and diligently to destroy it. And that an uprising by Iraqis, aided by little more than kind words every seven weeks from a State Department spokesman's assistant in the secondary press room, was and would always be impossible.

And this is not a war against simply terror. It is a war against oppression, against authoritarian societies and the cultures of death they inevitably breed, espoused most aggressively by the government, the people or both. The optimist can say that there will be peace in our time; but freedom must come first. To deny this is to deny the root of our danger and purpose of our war.

For nearly three years, now, we have heard from the White House a charged phrase describing their commitment to fighting terror primarily with military action. Here it was repeated in the president's address to the Union:

After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got.

And of course the left assumed these lines couldn't possibly be describing their intentions. Slander! No, they insisted, we will not be milksops. But here it is: their grand statement, perfectly tailored for the candidate they cheer on, and it answers the president's challenge as we want to do it anyway. The Democratic Party will serve tyranny and terror with legal papers. The lanky man in the red-pinstripe suit from the city has seen the rodeo; he'll ride that bull. He's seen it done before — he certainly has breadth to his frame — so why should the rurals laugh?

For John Kerry and John Edwards to deny their co-ownership of this brief would be an act of political cowardice, the culmination of what has now been a weeklong effort to throw burlap over the twisted form of the Democratic Party — a dysfunction better explained by the thunderous applause for the Corybantic likes of Ted Kennedy and Al Sharpton, whose hateful statements would silence an entire convention and end political careers if uttered by Republicans.

Likely John Kerry will again rationalize, mouth the right words and step back with advisors, thinking, "there, you see? We said it." Perhaps. But as hard as John Kerry the panderer will try to tell us all what we think we should hear from him, we will not hear this:

[Bush] was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character.

If John Kerry ever sincerely said that, I'd vote for him. As it is, it was said by a man who made a leftist's endorsement — for President Bush.