Yes, our allies notice when Kerry mocks them

One lesson that I'm trying to absorb is the degree to which the internet — along with global television news channels and other high-tech media — are transforming our international information-age society.  In my own blogging, I'm far too often guilty of thinking of my audience as if it were limited to the USA.  And yet, with one click of a hyperlink, I can tell at a glance that fully ten percent of the visits to my own website come from longitudes that don't pass through the USA; and I suppose that some unknown portion of the remaining ninety percent could be from Canada, Mexico, or Central or South America. 

If even BeldarBlog is being read in Poland and Pakistan and Australia, what chance is there that John Kerry's vastly more public, vastly more widely repeated comments about those countries won't be?

This morning, an emailer from Down Under pointed me to this op-ed in The Australian, that country's largest-selling newspaper, which was extracted and adapted from an article in The Weekly Standard by Gerald Baker, who's the U.S. editor of The Times of London.  So one presumes that in addition to the internet-savy Aussies who've been following US politics online, some millions more of their countrymen will learn today, if they hadn't already, about what Mr. Baker aptly characterizes (in a bit of American slang that I gather has gone world-wide, or at least to Oz) as John Kerry's "dissing so comprehensively the role played by US allies in Iraq":

LAST year, John Kerry told supporters that the more than 30 nations in the international operation to remove Saddam Hussein represented a "trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted".

Evidently pleased with this formulation, the Democratic presidential candidate revisited it last week. Promising again to build a real coalition to replace the one in Iraq, he heaped contempt on the efforts of those countries already there.

"When they talk about a coalition — that's the phoniest thing I ever heard," Kerry said. "You've got 500 troops here, 500 troops there, and it's American troops that are 90 per cent of the combat casualties and it's American taxpayers that are paying 90 per cent of the cost of the war." Never mind that Italy still has 2700 military personnel in Iraq, Britain has 8000 troops, Poland has 2400, Ukraine 1500, the Netherlands 1400, Romania 700 and South Korea 600.

True, these are small numbers compared with the vast US force. But most of these nations are also supporting US-led operations in Afghanistan and, given in many cases their exiguous defence budgets, their contributions are not insignificant to the countries themselves. And, strikingly, despite Kerry's scorn, they have borne a sizeable, roughly proportionate burden of total casualties. Meaningless to Kerry, of course. All just "window-dressing", in another of the senator's memorable recent phrases designed to prettify George W. Bush's "unilateral" war. It is odd to hear a candidate, who has made rebuilding relations with US allies a central part of his campaign platform, so casually dismiss the efforts of so many of those allies.

Some of my readers, in comments dissenting from my recent rants on this subject, have argued that Kerry's really just attacking Bush for failing to build a broader consensus and larger coalition.  Well, a politician who is statesmanlike and careful with his language — sensitive and nuanced, shall we say? — could perhaps have done so.  He could have prefaced his attacks on Bush — at least some of them, surely! — with words of gratitude and appreciation for the faithful allies that the US does have.

But John Forbes Kerry — the son of a career lawyer-diplomat, the multi-lingual product of elite Swiss boarding schools and bike-rides past the Berlin Wall and summer holidays in Brittany — hasn't. 

If his intent has been to tar only George W. Bush, he's used too large a paintbrush, and wielded it sloppily.  However far ahead a Kerry Administration might start off with the French or the Germans or the Belgians or the Luxembourgians, will that make up the ground he's lost with the Albanians, Armenians, Australians, Azerbaijanis, British, Bulgarians, Czechs, Danes, Dominicans, Dutch, Estonians, Georgians, Hondurans, Hungarians, Italians, Japanese, Kazakhstanis, Latvians, Lithuanians, Macedonians, Mongolians, Nicaraguans, Norwegians, Pakistanis, Poles, Portugese, Romanians, Saudis,  Singaporeans, Slovakians, South Koreans, Spaniards, Thais, Ukrainians, — and yes, even the Micronesians? 

(My list is drawn largely from this Congressional Research Service report (at page 40 of the .pdf file) of countries who've pledged forces in Iraq, plus a few other countries that I recall seeing elsewhere as having cooperated to one degree or another with the Bush Administration in the Global War on Terror.  Yes, some of those countries — Spain, for example — have withdrawn their troops, but that does not diminish the appreciation we owe them for the time their troops served.  Others — the Saudis, and probably several other countries that I haven't named — will be snickered at by skeptics as having been insincere or ineffective in their efforts; but again, one does not gain or retain friends by mocking countries' positive steps.)