Kerry, war and "prudence"

Probably the best reason to reject John Kerry is perfectly stated by Bill Hobbs:

John Kerry doesn't want to fight the War on Terror to win. He wants to play defense. That approach got 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11. It will get more killed - it could get you killed - if John Kerry is elected president and makes good on his promise to play defense in the war on terror.

Then there's this from Outside the Beltway:

[w]hile I get that he's apparently basing his entire campaign on the facts that 1) he went to Vietnam and 2) he's not George W. Bush, I'm constantly bemused that a man who has been in the public spotlight for thirty-odd years wants us to think that he left Vietnam and suddenly emerged last week wanting to be president. His entire political career has been elided for the purposes of the campaign. I honestly can't recall a presidential nominee who didn't point to any achievements from his adult career.

The biggest reason Vietnam was lost is that it was fought "prudently," not allowing our forces to operate above the DMZ or in neighboring countries being used by them. We didn't want to draw the Russians and Chinese into a wider war. This is also the reason why North Korea exists today as a Stalinist state. And it is what most worries me about Kerry as president. It would be bad to reward terrorists and resurgents in Iraq by bailing out on efforts to build democracy there, but it would be worse to fight a war without intending to win completely and decisively.

Right now, it's hard to figure out what Kerry would do to fight terrorism. He has acknowledged that we are in a global war, but he has criticized Bush for going to war "because we want to," as if anyone really wants to go to war. His acceptance speech is equivocal at best. He talks about looking the parent of our troops in the eye and telling them that we have to fight. I think that's what Bush did. The fact that our intelligence was poor has led to all kinds of recriminations and accusations of lying. How would Kerry deal with such a situation, such as attacking a target only to find that the terrorists weren't there. I think he'd be more like Clinton, and that would be imprudent.