John Kerry's long battle with incoherence continues today, as the Detroit News reports. Kerry, trying to resurrect his presidential hopes, attacked George Bush for the war yesterday -- but this time he griped about the war in Lebanon, claiming it never would have happened had Kerry won the election:

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.

"The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East," Kerry said. "We're going to have a lot of ground to make up (in 2008) because of it."

In fact, George Bush has worked with the UN in trying to settle the Hezbollah question, the very path that Kerry demanded Bush take with Iraq during the 2004 campaign. The US pressed for the adoption of UN Security Council 1559, which demanded that the Lebanese government disarm Hezbollah and remove them from the Israeli border. It was the Bush White House that allied with France -- the John Kerry gold standard of coalition-building -- to force Syria out of Lebanon after a popular uprising in 2005.

Kerry, however, ignores all of this. In fact, Kerry fell back into the losing strategy from 2004: complain and then offer no alternative. "We have to destroy Hezbollah," Kerry told his Democratic audience. Well, okay -- but how? Would Kerry have invaded Lebanon? Under what pretext?

George Bush pulled together a broad coalition of nations to invade Iraq only after twelve years of defiance in the face of 16 UN resolutions, and only after years of attacks on coalition aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone. Saddam's Iraq had never completed a peace treaty with the US and its partners after the Gulf War, only a cease-fire with conditions that Saddam refused to meet. Under those circumstances, a state of war already existed between Iraq and the coalition from the Gulf War; our invasion put it to an end.

In Lebanon, however, Kerry vaguely claims that he would "destroy" Hezbollah. Unless Kerry planned to have America invade Lebanon in exactly the same manner as the Israelis, that is nothing but an empty threat. Kerry doesn't have the stomach to face off against terrorists in Iraq, where the US has valid national-security concerns, such as control of the oil flow and dismantling of terrorists' lines of communication between Iran and Syria. Why should we believe he would have the werewithal to withstand the kind of casualties that Israel has taken and will continue to take in southern Lebanon?

Kerry reminds all of us why his candidacy went off the rails in 2004. He did much the same thing on Iraq, blasting Bush on his prosecution of the war, and then failing to propose any different strategy or tactics. Kerry keeps revealing himself as an empty suit, an anklebiter with nothing but criticism for others, lacking any kind of original thought or leadership.

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