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Very thought provoking op-ed in today's Washington Post from Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The premise of his argument is this. The major foreign policy point of Kerry's acceptance speech came when he announced that "as president, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation." But as Kagan rightly points out, that view of history simply does not match with the facts. Haiti, Mexico, Spain, WWI, even Vietnam - they're all examples of times when this nation has made the choice to go to war. So if the facts don't match, what could he possibly mean?

As Kagan points out, the key is in Vietnam. That was indeed a war of choice, and it was that very choice around which the anti-war left rallied. Upon his return from Vietnam, Kerry joined them in their call to end the war and bring our troops home.
Would it really be surprising if now, faced with another war of choice, he returned to the views which his own personal experience had taught?

In that context, his supposed "flip flop" on the war on Iraq takes on whole new meaning. It's his post 9/11 vote in favor of the war that is the abberation. It is there that he went against what he knows first had to be true.

All this I agree with. Kagan's conclusion, however, I think is the wrong one. He argues that if understood correctly, Kerry's call for a "doctrine of necessity" is a call for pacifism and isolation, one that rules out all wars "fought for humanitarian ends, all interventions to prevent genocide, to defend democracy or even, as in the case of the Persian Gulf War, to uphold international law against aggression. For those are all wars of choice."

After all, it really fundamentally depends on what Kerry's definition of "necessity" is. Is it necessary to engage in war to prevent genocide? I would argue that it is moral necessity. Is it necessary to engage in war to uphold international law against aggression? Again, I would argue that it is, even in the absence of treaties binding a nation to do exactly that.

To me, Kerry's call for "necessity" means that we will only engage in wars where our nation's interests are directly threatened. As a beacon of hope, freedom, and democracy in the world, I would argue we are indeed "threatened" when genocide goes unchecked. Take WWII. Who wouldn't argue that we had a moral responsibility to stop the genocide in Germany? Personally, I consider it a stain on this nation's history that we didn't act SOONER to prevent what we knew was going on under Hitler's reign.

All that said, Kagan does have a point. My definition of necessity may differ greatly from his, but in the end, the only definition that really matters is Kerry's. Let's hope this is addressed in the coming days and months.

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