Kerry wants Law Library report on Honduras retracted

Kerry seems to be one of Obama’s puppet masters. What a failure of a presidency.

cubachi on October 29, 2009 at 11:02 AM

I’m afraid that may be true when it comes to Central America policy. Kerry was at the center of the debate all through the 1980s about Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He had ties to the far-left Christic Institute and expressed sympathy for Communist rebels in El Salvador and Honduras. Some of us remember him as a near-seditionist who constantly tried to undermine U.S. policy in the region. I believe Kerry still harbors some sort of inane 1980s longing for a communist revolution throughout Central America.

rockmom on October 29, 2009 at 11:23 AM

Canny or not, Kerry has a record on Latin America — a substantial one. You will recall the 1980s, and that decade’s fierce debates over Central America policy. At the heart of these debates was Nicaragua: the Sandinistas, Castro, and the Soviet Union versus the Contras and the United States (or rather, not all of the United States: the Reagan administration, in particular). Kerry was an important player in all this. He was part of a group derided by Republicans as “‘Dear Comandante’ Democrats,” for they would address letters to Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista No. 1, “Dear Comandante.” (“But that’s his title,” they would plead, not unreasonably.) This group included such House members as Mike Barnes and Pete Kostmayer, and such senators as Chris Dodd and Tom Harkin — and John Kerry.

Only months after he was sworn in, Kerry joined Harkin on an infamous trip to Managua, to meet with Comandante Ortega. This was April 1985. The trip, according to an article in Policy Review magazine, was arranged by the Institute for Policy Studies, a hard-Left group. IPS was one of several such groups around Kerry back then. The trip, moreover, occurred a few days before a key vote in Congress on Contra aid — the bill proposed to send $14 million in humanitarian assistance to those anti-Communist rebels.

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When it came to Latin America policy at large, Kerry almost always ran with the Left crowd, but at least once he stood alone. In December 1985, he was the only senator to vote against money for police training in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. Even Senator Dodd voted for it. Yet another Republican Latin America specialist reflects, “Kerry aligned himself with all the leftist-chic causes, and he was virulently anti-Reagan. And he never apologized for it, never showed any regret, in light of how things have turned out in Central America. I mean, really: In El Salvador, they just had an election in which a tired old leftist guerrilla lost to a conservative candidate. Instead of meeting on the battlefield, they met at the ballot box. Everything was peaceful. The other countries are doing the same thing.” And will Kerry give no credit to the policies he tried to stop?

A disdain for American power has been part and parcel of the senator’s attitude.

He was quite sniffy about the invasion of Grenada, for example. He compared it to “Boston College playing football against the Sisters of Mercy.” (It’s funny how the Democrats were in harmony. Madeleine Albright — the future secretary of state — said, “It was the [Washington] Redskins versus the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the score was 101 to nothing.”) Kerry added, “The invasion of Grenada represents the Reagan policy of substituting public relations for diplomatic relations . . . The invasion represented a bully’s show of force against a weak Third World nation. The invasion only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle U.S.–Soviet and North–South relations.” Ponder that: The possible next president interpreted Grenada as “a bully’s show of force against a weak Third World nation.”

Needless to say, Kerry talks a little differently now. But has he changed his mind, or is he merely the Democratic nominee? For the benefit of South Florida, he’s claiming to be a big anti-Castroite: “I don’t like Fidel Castro. Some people have cottoned to him in our party [now there's an admission!] and go down and visit. I went to Cuba once and I purposely said I don’t want to.” That statement was a little mysterious. Kerry has also said, “I’m pretty tough on Castro, because I think he’s running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist, secret-police government in the world. And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.” That was a little mysterious too, for Kerry was one of only 22 senators to vote against Helms-Burton. His campaign later explained that he had voted for an early version of the bill, objecting to the final one because of Title III: which allows Americans whose property was stolen to sue foreign companies acquiring that property.

Kerry has — or had — long been a critic of U.S. policy on Cuba. In 2000, he said that “the only reason we don’t re-evaluate the policy is the politics of Florida.” Speaking of the politics of Florida: Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a congressman from Miami, says, “I have had to fight consistently against John Kerry for years. Every time there has been an effort to unilaterally provide the Cuban dictatorship with trade financing or tourism dollars, John Kerry has stood” with the unilateralists. Just recently, Kerry had this to say about the return of Elián González to Cuba (Elián was the boy plucked from the ocean): “I didn’t agree with that.” But he had supported the Clinton administration. Kerry, forced to elaborate, said, “I didn’t like the way they did it. I thought the process was butchered.” At the time of the Elián drama, Kerry said, “There’s obviously, now, a fair amount of sort of Cold War rhetoric. I would hope both countries would view this as an opportunity to reach beyond that, to find a new opening of opportunity for how we resolve this kind of issue.” Both countries: the Castro regime and the United States. That’s how John Kerry, pre-nomination, used to talk.

A trip down Memory Lane with John Kerry

rockmom on October 29, 2009 at 11:54 AM