Five or six times (I finally lost count!) during Thursday’s presidential foreign policy debate, George Bush accused John Kerry of saying it.

But Kerry hasn’t and won’t say it.

So let me say it for him — and for us: yes, Mr. President, the war in Iraq IS the wrong war, IN the wrong place, AT the wrong time.

The president, of course, was attempting to paint his opponent as wobbly and weak-kneed. But Kerry, tilting ever further toward the center, refused Bush’s bait. Once again the Vietnam anti-war hero who made his reputation thirty years ago by asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?” refused to denounce, and in fact embraced, the Iraq war.

Meanwhile every man, woman and child who dies there is dying for a mistake.

Although many aspects of the ongoing presidential campaign remain muddled, one thing has become, as a past president with a secret plan to end a war used to put it, “perfectly clear:” there is very little difference between Bush and Kerry when it comes to foreign policy generally — and the war in Iraq in particular.

The MSM, of course, spun the great debate as “a clash over Iraq” in which two candidates “squared off, relentlessly, on foreign policy issues.” After all, conflict (along with “character” and “story”) lies at the heart of any good narrative story arc — and without the manufactured conflict between the two debaters, they wouldn’t have much of a story.

In reality, however, the supposed chasm between Bush and Kerry on most foreign policy issues runs the gamut from A to B. Instead of denouncing the ill-conceived, misguided, imperialistic war launched by Bush & Co., Kerry instead simply argues that he can do it better. He says that he believes in being strong (does anyone believe in being weak?) but adds that we “have to be smart, too.” (Does anyone believe in being stupid?) He then adds a list of all the generals and admirals who support him.

Meanwhile his allegedly detailed but still rather secret ‘plan’ to do so seems to amount to calling a summit of world leaders to discuss matters. Oh yes, and asking the United Nations to help. And let’s not forget training Iraqi soldiers ‘better’ so we can Vietnamize, er Iraqize, the struggle and reduce our troop commitment there.

Except first we will inevitably have to send MORE troops in to stabilize the situation.

Why is Kerry playing Hubert Humphrey to Bush’s Dick Nixon? Either the Democrat really believes the security-and-strength claptrap — in which case he doesn’t deserve to be elected votes — or else he’s lying in order to become president.

I think it’s the latter — and that fairly obvious lie, hammered home relentlessly by the Demo-Securo-crats throughout and ever since their convention in Boston — is the wrong frame for the wrong party at the wrong time. It’s also, as I pointed out at that time (See “Dude, Where’s My Party“) a recipe for a Republican victory on November, and one reason for Kerry’s precipitous post-convention slump in the polls.

When many undecided voters look at and listen to John Kerry as he talks endlessly about security, strength terror, and war, and two things happen:

1) They sense he isn’t telling the truth, and
2) They run back to the real Republicans.

Will the others close their eyes, hold their noses, and chant (all together now):

“Anybody but Bush! Anybody but Bush!” ???

Yo, John! THIS IS WHERE WE CAME IN!

Remember — you got where you are today because you were the war hero who became anti-war. Talk about a flip-flop-there’s one I can support. Which reminds me — what ever happened to the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?”

Does “Anybody But Bush” mean voting — again! — for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party? To be coupled with a Republican Senate, and a Republican House, along with the Republican Supreme Court?

When Bush says Iraq used to be a place where people got their hands chopped off, why doesn’t Kerry remind voters that it has now become a place where they get their heads chopped off?

When Bush says we’re “100,000 Iraqi troops have gotten training” thus far, why doesn’t Kerry point out that, as Bush’s own Defense Department official Richard Armitage recently admitted, most of them aren’t troops at all — but Iraqi police officers who’ve gotten three weeks of “shake and bake” training?

When Bush falsely claims foreign terrorists are pouring into Iraq (See “Strange Bedfellows at the Not-So Great Debate“) when virtually all military analysts say precisely the opposite, why does Kerry falsely say the same thing?

Because he thinks it will get him elected, that’s why.

“We can’t leave a failed Iraq,” Kerry said in the debate. “Now we have to succeed.”

But there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all. “I made a mistake in how I talk about the war,” Kerry said in the debate. “The President made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?”

But Kerry is still making a mistake in how he talks about the war. Is it possible the mistakes are equally bad? Shouldn’t he simply tell the truth, as he claims he wants?

And the truth is that this is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

And two wrongs don’t make it right.