Reply #12: Well he already has 2

[karynnj]

He clearly had an impact on Vietnam and ending Reagan's illegal covert Central American wars. Vietnam is well known and now honored in a Bruce Springsteen song. Here's a link on Central America. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/elections/elsalvador/
" The war that once raged in El Salvador in the 1980s -- a flashpoint in the Cold War -- is not a topic of debate in the current U.S. presidential race. But the ghosts of the conflict linger.

"You're not always measured by the things that you have a bill named after you for -- sometimes you're measured by stopping really bad things from happening, like when I stood up and helped stop Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America," Senator Kerry declared on a recent campaign stop in Wisconsin.

In 1986, John Kerry, then a freshman senator, was a persistent critic of the Reagan-Bush policies in Central America. Drawing parallels to his experience in Vietnam, Kerry called for an end to the contra war in Nicaragua and was a critic of U.S. policy in El Salvador. Kerry gained both admirers and enemies when he chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, which reporters quickly dubbed the "Kerry committee." Kerry's investigation of the then-obscure Colonel Oliver North eventually helped to uncover the Iran Contra scandal. Kerry's supporters admired his maverick spirit and courage; conservatives attacked him for playing into the hands of communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua. "

Domestically, that Kerry ended the Contra drug running by exposing it may have been one of the reasons that the nightmare that was many inner cities improved after the late 1980s. Crack cocaine became less of a problem - exactly the drug they were bringing in.

As to the comment that it is like the surge - read these paragraphs. This is designed to cut the use of military force:
"Clearly, some military steps are necessary to make our crucial non-military efforts successful and sustainable. And the most obvious is providing sufficient numbers of troops to stabilize a deteriorating security situation. I’ve spoken with top military officials who have emphasized to me just how thinly stretched our troops are in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Unquestionably, if we want to clear, hold, and build—which is what you do in a counterinsurgency—we need more boots on the ground.

It may seem counterintuitive, but we also need more troops to make our overall counterinsurgency effort ultimately depend less on the use of military force. During the first half of 2007, while the Administration escalated troop levels in Iraq, there were four times as many air strikes in Afghanistan as there were in Iraq. That’s because, without enough troops, we were forced to rely more on air operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Inevitably, that results in excessive civilian casualties that only serve to inflame public opinion in the Muslim world and facilitate recruitment for jihadists. In southwestern Afghanistan, support for NATO forces has plummeted from 83% a year ago to 45% this year, due in large part to civilian casualties. Just last week in Nuristan Province, coalition planes acting on faulty intelligence are said to have bombed and killed 14 Afghan civilians asleep in their tents. The men were a construction crew building roads. We cannot allow warplanes to be the leading edge of our presence in Afghanistan. That’s a recipe for winning the battle and losing the war."