Senator Kerry emerged yesterday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” to offer an explanation of why he thinks he lost the election. “I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race,” he said. “Security was the overwhelming issue.”

And if one needed a reminder of just why Mr. Kerry lost the voters on the security issue, consider what the Democrat from Massachusetts had to say yesterday, on Iraqi election day. He cited the dictator of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, in carping that America hadn’t taken the government of Egypt up on its offer to train more Iraqi security forces. And Mr. Kerry made a similar complaint about the Bush administration with respect to the kingdom of Jordan, saying that Jordan, too, could have trained more Iraqis.

It’s hard to think of a clearer demonstration that, when it comes to the mission in Iraq and in the rest of the Middle East, Mr. Kerry just doesn’t get it. Mr. Mubarak has ruled in Egypt since 1981, running unopposed and garnering about 95% of the vote in periodic “elections.” His state-controlled press spreads vitriolic anti-Semitism. Egypt spawned the September 11 hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta. The State Department’s most recent religious freedom report records that in Egypt, “The Government continued to try citizens for unorthodox religious beliefs.” Egypt is dominated by Sunni Islam, while Iraq has a Shiite majority. Egypt’s attitude toward women was pretty well summed up by a dispatch by Neil MacFarquhar in last week’s New York Times, reporting, “The standard three-step program for any unmarried upper-class Egyptian girl who becomes pregnant is an abortion, an operation to refurbish her virginity with a new hymen and then marriage to the first unwitting suitor the family can snare.”

That Mr. Kerry wants more security forces for a free and democratic Iraq to be trained in Egypt is a sign that either he doesn’t really believe in Iraqi freedom and democracy or that he hasn’t thought the matter through clearly.

Jordan is almost as bad as Egypt. Amman was neutral in the first Gulf War and afterward served as a forum for smuggling that enriched Saddam Hussein’s regime. It, too, is hardly a free democracy; it is a monarchy. The Jordanian government is being sued in American federal court by a leading Iraqi politician, Ahmad Chalabi, who says that the Jordanian king conspired to undermine him politically. So it wouldn’t make sense for Jordan to train Iraqi troops whose job it would be to protect Mr. Chalabi.

Mr. Kerry doesn’t seem to have thought that through, either. It was an incredibly clumsy move by the Democrat – to take a day on which the Iraqi people were providing the Middle East with a stirring example of freedom, and use it to suggest that what the Iraqis really need is a lesson from the unfree Arab states. It’s the Jordanians and Egyptians who could use some training from Iraq, not the other way around.