Last post for awhile on US Presidential politics. I promise. Having set the table on the domestic side below, a post came along from Mr. Bevan at Real Clear Politics (an invaluable site for US political junkies, by the way) which does a nice job of framing the choice facing American voters this fall on the foreign policy side:

[N]o Democrat, with only one or two exceptions in the entire elected party, would have looked at the exact same intelligence Bush looked at with respect to Iraq after 9/11 and done much of anything - even though they agreed with Bush at the time that Hussein was a serious threat.

And:

Indeed, far more damning than Bush acting on evidence almost everyone in the world believed to be true is to look at a hypothetical in reverse: What if all of the WMD intelligence on Iraq had been spot on and John Kerry were President at the time and chose not to act because of pressure from his party or the objections of allies? I think most Americans would find that prospect deeply disturbing.

Kerry and his fellow Democrats are, for the most part, transnational progressivists committed to having international institutions to deal with bad actors like Saddam. Mr. Bevan provides a useful reminder of how such institutions actually fared, in the real world:

Saddam played cat-and-mouse with the U.S. and the U.N. for nearly a year before finally booting UNSCOM out of Iraq altogether in August 1998.

The response? On September 9, 1998 the UN Security Council passed yet another resolutioncondemning Iraq's lack of cooperation with inspectors.

On December 16, 1998 the U.S. launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day [ineffectual] bombing campaign against military targets in Iraq.

[On December 21, 1998, the NYT reported that:] Sunday in Paris, President Jacques Chirac of France called for a prompt lifting of the oil embargo. His country's major oil companies have for years been eager to return to work in Iraq, although record low oil prices make this less attractive now.

In fact, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (France, Russia, & China) responded to the limited use of military force against Saddam for his continued violation of UNSC resolutions by calling to lift the economic sanctions against Iraq and disband UNSCOM completely. And that was basically the end of the whole affair.

Americans tend to prefer leaders who take decisive and effective action against known threats. The media, of course, favors Kerry, and is trying to obscure Kerry's catastrophic weakness as a leader with the side issue of whether the universally accepted intelligence on Iraq from several years ago was any good.

No leader can afford to wait for perfect information before acting - in the real world, where inaction has consequences, you have to do the best you can with what you have. It is pretty clear that the best Kerry can do, even with the kind of international consensus that existed on Saddam Hussein two years ago, is look around for someone else to take charge.