FOOT IN MOUTH

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JOHN KERRY, FOOT IN MOUTH

By JOHN PODHORETZ

October 29, 2004 -- HERE'S a question for which only Tuesday will provide an answer: Did John Kerry make a colossal blunder by deciding to spend the last week of the campaign highlighting the fact that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was one giant ammunition dump?

Ignore for a moment the conflicting details of the incredibly confusing story about the 380 tons of high explosives that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad. Accept, for now, John Kerry's contention that the explosives went missing after the fall of Baghdad and that President Bush's negligence in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath are responsible.

The other day, Kerry said: "After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles — where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept. Today we learned that these explosives are missing, unaccounted for and could be in the hands of terrorists."

Kerry has just bollixed up his own storyline about the war in Iraq. He is concluding his campaign by drawing an explicit association between Saddam Hussein, dangerous weaponry and international terrorists.

That's Bush's argument. Not Kerry's.

Kerry's account of the past 18 months is that Saddam's weaponry wasn't sufficient grounds for invasion and overthrow. After all, he said in the first presidential debate, "35 to 40 countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons [of mass destruction] at the moment the president invaded than Saddam."

But in thundering about the vast danger posed by 380 tons of high explosive, Kerry is sure making it sound like Saddam possessed uniquely dangerous weapons.

Yet what the American people know about Kerry from the debates is that he believes this was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," and a "diversion" from the War on Terror. What they know about the president is that he believes Saddam was a "threat," and the world is safer with him in a prison cell.

Kerry has inadvertently added fuel to Bush's fire. He has advanced Bush's case without meaning to. In his eagerness to jump on any piece of anti-Bush news and turn it to his advantage, Kerry failed to examine just how his new argument makes a hash of his old argument — and how it might actually do the president a little bit of good.

This is more proof of the Bush campaign's secret weapon — Kerry's poor political instincts. Somebody with a better feel for the political game would never have said that he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.

And somebody who is battling for votes both in Florida and New Jersey — states with substantial Cuban-American populations — would never have offered up the headshaking statement Kerry delivered yesterday, equating the failed effort to oust Fidel Castro in 1961 with the successful effort to oust Saddam in 2003.

"When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say, 'I take responsibility, it's my fault," said Kerry. "John Kennedy knew how to take responsibility for the mistakes he made and Mr. President, it's long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes you made."

Liberals like Kerry, in fact, have tended to believe the Bay of Pigs was a mistake from the get-go because we had no business trying to save Cuba from the Stalinist nightmare in which it has been mired for 45 years. That is the implication of Kerry's remark, and it reveals just how tone-deaf he is when it comes to dealing with totalitarian evil — ranging from Castro's tyranny 90 miles off our shore to Saddam Hussein's Mesopotamian charnel house.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

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