"Kerry's Foreign Policy Record Suggests Few Differences with Bush"

Stephen Zunes, www.dissidentvoice.org

Those who had hoped that a possible defeat of President George W.
Bush in November would mean real changes in U.S. foreign policy have
little to be hopeful about now that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
has effectively captured the Democratic presidential nomination.That Senator Kerry supported the Bush Administration's invasion of
Iraq and lied about former dictator Saddam Hussein possessing a
sizable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify it
would be reason enough to not support him. (See my March 1, 2004
article "Kerry's Support for the Invasion of Iraq and the Bush
Doctrine Still Unexplained"
)

However, a look at his record shows that Kerry's overall foreign
policy agenda has also been a lot closer to the Republicans than to
the rank-and-file Democrats he claims to represent.

This is not too surprising, given that his top foreign policy
advisors include: Rand Beers, the chief defender of the deadly
airborne crop-fumigation program in Colombia who has justified U.S.
support for that country's repressive right-wing government by
falsely claiming that Al-Qaeda was training Colombian rebels; Richard
Morningstar, a supporter of the dictatorial regime in Azerbaijan and
a major backer of the controversial Baku-Tbilisi oil pipeline, which
placed the profits of Chevron, Halliburton and Unocal above human
rights and environmental concerns; and, William Perry, the retired
Republican Senator, former Secretary of Defense, member of the
Carlisle Group, and advocate for major military contractors.

More importantly, however, are the positions that Kerry himself advocates:

For example, Senator Kerry has supported the transfer, at taxpayer
expense, of tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments and
weapons systems to governments which engage in a pattern of gross and
systematic human rights violations. He has repeatedly ignored the
Arms Control Export Act and other provisions in U.S. and
international law promoting arms control and human rights.

Senator Kerry has also been a big supporter of the neo-liberal model
of globalization. He supported NAFTA, despite its lack of adequate
environmental safeguards or labor standards. He voted to ratify U.S.
membership in the World Trade Organization, despite its ability to
overrule national legislation that protects consumers and the
environment, in order to maximize corporate profits. He even pushed
for most-favored nation trading status for China, despite that
government's savage repression of independent unions and
pro-democracy activists.

Were it not for 9/11 and its aftermath, globalization would have
likely been the major foreign policy issue of the 2004 presidential
campaign. Had this been the case, Kerry would have clearly been
identified on the right wing of the Democratic contenders.

As Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in the early 1980s, Kerry
ignored widespread public opposition to encourage the Reagan
Administration to base a large naval flotilla in Boston Harbor, which
would include as its central weapons system the nuclear-armed
Tomahawk cruise missile. Kerry's advocacy for the deployment of this
dangerous and destabilizing first-strike weapon not only raised
serious environmental concerns for residents of the Boston area, but
was widely interpreted as an effort to undermine the proposed nuclear
weapons freeze.

The end of the Cold War did not have much impact on Senator Kerry's
penchant for supporting the Pentagon. Despite the lack of the Soviet
Union to justify wasteful military boondoggles, Senator Kerry has
continued to vote in favor of record military budgets, even though
only a minority of the spending increases he has supported in recent
years has had any connection with the so-called "war on terrorism."

Senator Kerry was a strong supporter of the Bush Administration's
bombing campaign of Afghanistan, which resulted in more civilian
deaths than the 9/11 attacks against the United States that prompted
them. He also defended the Clinton Administration's bombing of a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan which had provided that impoverished
African country with more than half of its antibiotics and vaccines
by falsely claiming it was a chemical weapons factory controlled by
Osama bin Laden.

In late 1998, he joined Republican Senators Jesse Helms, Strom
Thurmond, Alfonse D'Amato, and Rich Santorum in calling on the
Clinton Administration to consider launching air and missile strikes
against Iraq in order to "respond effectively to the threat posed by
Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." The
fact that Iraq had already ended such programs some years earlier was
apparently not a concern to Senator Kerry.

Nor was he at all bothered that a number of U.S. allies in the region
actually did have such weapons. To this day, Senator Kerry has
rejected calls by Jordan, Syria, and other Middle Eastern governments
for a WMD-free zone for the entire region, insisting that the United
States has the right to say which countries can possess such weapons
and which cannot. He was a co-sponsor of the "Syrian Accountability
Act," passed in November, which demanded under threat of sanctions
that Syria unilaterally eliminate its chemical weapons and missile
systems, despite the fact that nearby U.S. allies like Israel and
Egypt had far larger and more advanced stockpiles of WMDs and
missiles, including in Israel's case hundreds of nuclear weapons.
(See my October 30 article, "The Syrian Accountability Act and the
Triumph of Hegemony" )

Included in the bill's "findings" were charges by top Bush
Administration officials of Syrian support for international
terrorism and development of dangerous WMD programs. Not only have
these accusations not been independently confirmed, but they were
made by the same Bush Administration officials who had made similar
claims against Iraq that had been proven false. Yet Senator Kerry
naively trusts their word over independent strategic analysts
familiar with the region who have challenged many of these charges.

Kerry's bill also calls for strict sanctions against Syria as well as
Syria's expulsion from its non-permanent seat Security Council for
its failure to withdraw its forces from Lebanon according to UN
Security Council resolution 520. This could hardly be considered a
principled position, however, since Kerry defended Israel's 22-year
long occupation of southern Lebanon, that finally ended less than
four years ago, and which was in defiance of this and nine other UN
Security Council resolutions.

Indeed, perhaps the most telling examples of Kerry's neo-conservative
world view is his outspoken support of the government of right-wing
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, annually voting to send billions
of dollars worth of taxpayer money to support Sharon's occupation and
colonization of Palestinian lands seized in the 1967 war. Even as the
Israeli prime minister continues to reject calls by Palestinian
leaders for a resumption of peace talks, Kerry insists that it is the
Palestinian leadership which is responsible for the conflict while
Sharon is "a leader who can take steps for peace."

Despite the UN Charter forbidding countries from expanding their
territory by force and the passage, with U.S. support, of a series of
UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to rescind its
unilateral annexation of occupied Arab East Jerusalem and surrounding
areas, Kerry has long fought for U.S. recognition of the Israeli
conquest. He even attacked the senior Bush Administration from the
right when it raised concerns regarding the construction of illegal
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, going on
record, paradoxically, that "such concerns inhibit and complicate the
search for a lasting peace in the region." He was also critical of
the senior Bush Administration's refusal to veto UN Security Council
resolutions upholding the Fourth Geneva Conventions and other
international legal principles regarding Israeli colonization efforts
in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Kerry's extreme anti-Palestinian positions have bordered on
pathological. In 1988, when the PLO which administered the health
system in Palestinian refugee camps serving hundreds of thousands of
people and already had observer status at the United Nations sought
to join the UN's World Health Organization, Kerry backed legislation
that would have ceased all U.S. funding to the WHO or any other UN
entity that allowed for full Palestinian membership. Given that the
United States then provided for a full one-quarter of the WHO's
budget, such a cutoff would have had a disastrous impact on
vaccination efforts, oral re-hydration programs, AIDS prevention, and
other vital WHO work in developing countries.

The following year, just four days after Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir restated that Israel would never give up the West Bank
and Gaza Strip and would continued to encourage the construction of
new Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, Kerry signed a
statement that appeared in the Washington Post praising the
right-wing prime minister for his "willingness to allow all options
to be put on the table." Kerry described Shamir's proposal for
Israeli-managed elections in certain Palestinian areas under Israeli
military occupation as "sincere and far-reaching" and called on the
Bush Administration to give Shamir's plan its "strong endorsement."
This was widely interpreted as a challenge to Secretary of State
James Baker's call several weeks earlier for the Likud government to
give up on the idea of a "greater Israel."

In his effort to enhance Shamir's re-election prospects in 1992,
Senator Kerry again criticized the senior President Bush from the
right, this time for its decision to withhold a proposed $10 billion
loan guarantee in protest of the rightist prime minister's expansion
of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The administration's decision to hold back on the loan guarantees
until after the election made possible the defeat of Shamir by the
more moderate Yitzhak Rabin. However, when the new Israeli prime
minister went to Norway during the summer of 1993 to negotiate with
the Palestine Liberation Organization for a peace plan, Kerry joined
the Israeli right in continuing to oppose any peace talks between
Israel and the PLO.

Indeed, for most of his Senate career, Kerry was in opposition of the
Palestinians' very right to statehood. As recently as 1999, he went
on record opposing Palestinian independence outside of what the
Israeli occupation authorities were willing to allow.

Today, Kerry not only defends Israel's military occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, he has backed Sharon's policies of
utilizing death squads against suspected Palestinian militants. He
claims that such tactics are a justifiable response to terrorist
attacks by extremists from the Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, even though neither of them existed prior to Israel's 1967
military conquests and both emerged as a direct outgrowth of the
U.S.-backed occupation and repression that followed.

In summary, Kerry's October 2002 vote to authorize the U.S. invasion
of Iraq was no fluke. His contempt for human rights, international
law, arms control, and the United Nations has actually been rather
consistent.

When Howard Dean initially surged ahead in the polls in the race for
the Democratic presidential nomination, in large part due to his
forceful opposition to the invasion of Iraq and some other aspects of
Bush foreign policy, the Kerry campaign launched a series of vicious
attacks against the former Vermont governor.

Dean was certainly no left-winger. His foreign policy advisors were
largely from mainstream think tanks and he received the endorsements
of former vice-president Al Gore and others in the Democratic Party
establishment. Indeed, a number of Dean's positions such as his
refusal to call for a reduction in military spending, his support for
the war in Afghanistan, his backing unconditional military and
economic aid to Sharon's government in Israel, and his call for
continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq were quite problematic in the
eyes of many peace and human rights advocates.

That was not enough for Senator Kerry, however, who apparently
believed that Dean was not sufficiently supportive of President
George W. Bush's imperial world view. Kerry and his supporters
roundly criticized Dean for minimizing the impact of Saddam Hussein's
capture on Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation, for calling on
the United States to play a more even-handed role in the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and for challenging the Bush
Doctrine of unilateral preemptive invasions of foreign countries.
(See my September 14 article "Kerry, Lieberman, and the House
Democratic Leadership Attack Dean"
and my January 7
article "Democrats' Attacks on Dean Enhance Bush's Re-election
Prospects" )

It was just such attacks that helped derailed Dean's populist
campaign and has made John Kerry the presumptive nominee.

The Democrats are wrong, however, if they think that nominating a
Bush Lite will increase their party's chances of capturing the White
House. In all likelihood, it will do the opposite: for every hawk who
might now consider voting for the Democratic ticket, there will be at
least one dove who will now be more likely to vote for Ralph Nader.

[Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of Politics and chair of the
Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco,
and author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of
Terrorism.]