Senator Kerry sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has been running for president for more than a year. Over the course of that year, he has said repeatedly that President Bush has overseen “the most arrogant, inept, reckless, ideological foreign policy in the modern history of this country,” and that, as he told the Council on Foreign Relations in December, “We have lost the good will of the world, overextended our troops, and endangered, not enhanced, our own security.” And to fix the policies that he sees as impossibly broken in Iraq, Mr. Kerry has laid out a four-point plan for “winning the peace” there. Indeed, many believe the reason he surged in Iowa was by making clear that he, unlike Howard Dean, was ready to be commander-in-chief. “Don’t just send them a message,” he told crowds. “Send them a President.”

Yet after all that, Mr. Kerry isn’t so sure what he would do now in Iraq. In the issue of Time magazine on newsstands this week, he says he will likely send a team of Democratic colleagues and experts to Iraq to help formulate the detailed answers about what must be done next, “so I have a strong basis on which to proceed.” So are we to understand that Mr. Kerry did not have a strong basis when he concluded, without an “if,” an “and,” or a “but,” that Mr. Bush has overseen “the most arrogant, inept, reckless, ideological foreign policy in the modern history of this country,” staple language in his speeches, or that, as he told the Council on Foreign Relations in December, “We have lost the good will of the world, overextended our troops, and endangered, not enhanced, our own security”?

As one of the central arguments of his candidacy, Mr. Kerry seems determined to convince the American people that Iraq is an intractable quagmire, and that only he can fix it. Never mind that the number of coalition soldiers killed in January and February (75) was less than half the number killed in the previous two months (158). Never mind that Iraq’s oil production and electricity generation will soon surpass prewar levels.

Free Iraq, moreover, is on the verge of adopting a constitution that poses a major threat to the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East. This is why the combination of Al Qaeda agents and Saddam loyalists battling the Coalition are so panicked at the prospect of a signing, as the world saw in the desperate attacks yesterday. But as Paul Bremer make clear on CNN, there is little doubt that the constitution will be signed in the coming days.

Or, for that matter, that it’s an extraordinary exercise in national building that has involved all the great debates over the rights of minorities and interests of regions and factions that animated the Miracle at Philadelphia more than 200 years ago. When that constitution is signed, a great struggle will begin to preserve it and build upon it, just as there was in America.

Which side is Mr. Kerry going to be on? In recent days he has been asserting that he would have stood by the regime of the Haitian tyrant, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on the theory that Mr. Aristide was democratically elected. It’s a hard claim to credit, and not only because Mr. Aristide abandoned the idea of Haitian democracy years ago.

There is also Mr. Kerry’s record in Vietnam. Our war there was a struggle to support a country, in the free Vietnamese republic in the south, that was striving, no more imperfectly than Mr. Kerry insists Mr. Aristide was striving, for its own liberal democracy. And Mr. Kerry abandoned Vietnam just when its freedom was in the balance. It’s starting to look like Mr. Kerry’s plan to send a fact-finding team to Iraq is but the beginning of a campaign to abandon the struggle for freedom in yet another country beset by our common enemies. Who’s he going to send, Jane Fonda?