Bush's War, Kerry's Challenge
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Election 2004 Bush's War, Kerry's Challenge By Andrew J. Glass Washington For the first TIME in more than a generation we are in the midst of a Presidential campaign whose major issue is...
...The next day, however, at a mini-press conference, he backpedaled somewhat when asked how he squared his belief that the world is better off with Saddam out of power and his statement that he would not have gone to war in Iraq...
...It remains to be seen how much weight voters will give to Bush's assertions that the vast majority of Iraqis "are defying the dire predictions of a lot of people by moving toward democracy...
...Some intelligence analysts say it may be possible to contain the insurgency and achieve a tenuous stability...
...The objective was to neutralize the issue of national security, which had bedeviled the Democrats in the 2002 midterm elections...
...But since we are in it, you deserve competent leadership and the whole truth...
...Although it remains Bush's race to lose, Kerry has managed to tighten the contest by putting the incumbent on the defensive...
...They noted that besides the District of Columbia, McGovern's only electoral votes came from Massachusetts...
...He has done so by moving the war in Iraq to the forefront of the campaign...
...media (never mind Al Jazeera) for billing the kidnappings and suicide bombings as major news—knowing, as they do, that little can be done to stop them between now and Election Day...
...tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003 is now considered the best possible outcome...
...viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, nor the occupation of the country by Bush's "coalition of the willing...
...The biggest political story in September was not "Rathergate," but Kerry's go-for-broke decision to reorient his campaign around Iraq...
...Kerry therefore emerged from the 90minute encounter an invigorated candidate with a re-energized base behind him...
...In truth, the Bush camp should be grateful the press has not further played up the sad and salient fact that there has yet to be an outcry, at either the elite or popular level of Iraqi society, against those grisly attacks...
...In his remaining campaign appearances Bush will likely continue to gloss over recent State Department figures showing that fewer than half of Iraq's 85,000 Iraqi police, and fewer than 40 per cent of its 12,700-member Army, have received any training...
...Questions Kerry had raised previously—about national security, intelligence lapses, linking Saddam and Al Qaeda, alienating old allies, etc.—are still on the table, supporting the charge of incompetence at the top...
...With the first hint of fall in the air, Kerry has also decided to try to make Bush's performance as a wartime President the election's pivotal issue...
...At the Democratic National Convention Kerry linked Iraq and Vietnam the wrong way...
...But Iraq, not personality, is the key to this November's election...
...taxpayers...
...And you're getting neither from President Bush...
...The comedian Mark Russell observed, "Forthe first time in his life, John Kerry experimented with clarity...
...Meanwhile, what was widely viewed within the Administration as the worstcase scenario when U.S...
...Their grievances are unlikely to be assuaged no matter how many dilapidated schools are restored or how many electric generators are given away courtesy of U.S...
...Then Kerry said: "My answer [would be] no— because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe...
...Senator John Kerry's memory of his own initial bid for public office in 1972, when he lost as a young antiwar candidate seeking a Massachusetts Congressional seat, may account for his unwillingness to advocate a quick exit from America's present Middle Eastern folly—even though a hefty chunk of his supporters hold in contempt President George W. Bush's line that if we stay the course, a democratic Iraq will emerge from the ashes of Saddam Hussein's unlamentedregime...
...The format, limiting candidates' responses to two minutes or less, obliged Kerry to avoid the meandering riffs that have earned him derision...
...His own Senate authorization vote, he insists, was merely meant to give the President the authority he needed "to act effectively" in dealing with Saddam Hussein, not to mount an immediate invasion...
...Privately, his people are furious with the mainstream U.S...
...At least he has regained the political footing that put him in a dead heat with the incumbent before the conventions...
...After watching his poll numbers drop steadily, Kerry accepted the counsel of the newly arrived Clinton brain trust and stopped fretting over the Democratic base...
...Since the initial invasion that quickly toppled Saddam's regime, Iraqis by and large have embraced neither his formerly exiled foes in charge of the interim government brokered by Lakhdar Brahimi, a UN envoy from Algeria, and departed U.S...
...But by the first of the three televised Presidential debates, in Coral Gables, Florida, Kerry was artfully parrying Bush's "mixed message" charge...
...But Kerry's "reporting for duty" gambit fell flat...
...Louis, but on a substantive level both candidates reprised their markettested soundbites and neither closed the sale...
...Whether by design or by ignorance, Bush's take on the state of affairs in Iraq seems to border on the delusional...
...Many of the 70 million who watched were getting their first good look at the challenger, and the polls indicated they liked what they saw...
...The test for Kerry is to convince voters that he would be a strong leader, and that they have been ill-served by the incumbent...
...He sensed that the antiwar Howard Dean supporters, who were derailed in the primaries by his "electability" strategy, so detest Bush that they will follow any plausible message the Democratic candidate might fashion...
...In a seminal speech at New York University, he asked: "Is [Bush] really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threats, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to AI Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq...
...Moreover, he hit Bush from the Left (charging the President with "a colossal error of judgment" in leading us into a war in Iraq) and from the Right (declaring he would "change the dynamics on the ground" by beefing up U.S...
...His "I'm pleased with the progress" mantra recalls a tactic that LBJ followed, until the 1968 Tet offensive shattered his hopes for a second term...
...that what the United States seeks to accomplish in Iraq bears directly on the need to crush Islamic terrorism...
...forces and pursuing the insurgents in their strongholds...
...In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon buried his Democratic opponent, Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, beneath a landslide of near-historic dimensions by posing as an unyielding "peace" candidate...
...Even adding in raw recruits, the homegrown post-Saddam security force is well short of the announced goal of 213,000 police officers and 23,600 soldiers...
...When viewed in the context of a fluid geopolitical situation and the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, there is actually a logical pattern to the Senator's Iraq record that apparently has seeped through...
...Election 2004 Bush's War, Kerry's Challenge By Andrew J. Glass Washington For the first TIME in more than a generation we are in the midst of a Presidential campaign whose major issue is a violent struggle against an elusive foe abroad in which Americans continue to die...
...Until a reliable army of U.S-trained Iraqis emerges, coalition forces will not be able to step aside...
...Now, in the final weeks of the campaign, it is fairly clear that neither Kerry's occupying the high ground on domestic issues—tax equity, employment, health care, Social Security—nor Bush's deficit-inflating policies and "compassionate conservative" blather will have a great impact on the outcome November 2. Instead, the once again too-close-to-call Presidential contest appears pretty much back to where it was this summer in Boston and New York, albeit with some new twists...
...In speaking of Bush as a failed war President, Kerry says the decision to invade Iraq, instead of bolstering antiterrorism efforts, marked "a profound diversion" from that ongoing struggle...
...Thus Bush, while branding his opponent the Senate's "most liberal member," takes special delight in deriding Kerry's votes relating to Iraq as proof that he would flip-flop on national security in the Oval Office...
...forces from South Vietnam...
...The third encounter, in Tempe, Arizona, saw them offer their widely divergent views on domestic issues...
...A month later, when the President came on stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver his climactic acceptance speech, he put the relevant facts aside and meshed Iraq with the global battle against terrorism...
...In the days before his appearance, the Grand Old Party had rammed home three related themes: that the war on terror defines the Bush Presidency...
...Indeed, Kerry argues that America should not have gone to war...
...Early on, though, Kerry was tagged by his detractors as a Boston Brahmin, a stiff and a snob—charges that still plague him...
...Kerry successfully dodged and jabbed as Bush made repeated attempts to tag him as a wishy-washy tax-and-spend liberal...
...Ghassan Atiyya, director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy, recently told Newsweek: "The Americans have created a series of fictional dates and events in order to delude themselves...
...Critics from within and outside his party 32 years ago said Kerry failed because he ran a poor campaign...
...By contrast, the cameras' split-screen cutaways captured Bush's peevish demeanor, and toward the end he seemed out of rhetorical gas...
...Bush showed more verve in the less formal "town hall" format of the second debate, in St...
...A week after his second inauguration the Treaty of Paris was signed, providing for the ignominious withdrawal of all U.S...
...For his part, Bush clung tightly to a precooked script relieved only by a few stabs at humor...
...Publicly, Bush sniffs at such "naysayers...
...To keep his present address, the President has to make that label stick...
...If I had been your President, his message goes, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in...
...and that Kerry is a proven flip-flopper in his approach to these vital problems...
...Andrew J. GLASS, a longtime NL contributor, is a veteran Washington observer...
...An independent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, done at Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's request, reported in September that "in every sector we looked at, we saw backward movement in recent months...
...In his acceptance speech, he intimated that his heroic service in Southeast Asia 30 years ago would make him a stronger wartime commander in chief than Bush, who found a safe haven during the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
