A revealing debateAMERICANS NEEDED the clash of ideas they heard Thursday night from President Bush and John Kerry. In their reasoned, substantive debate on foreign policy and national security, Bush and Kerry did something that is indispensable in a mature democracy: They made themselves accountable to the public.
Kerry won the debate primarily because he was able to describe in clear terms the avoidable blunders Bush has made in Iraq, in the campaign against Osama bin Laden, in permitting North Korea to reprocess the plutonium for several nuclear weapons, and in pursing policies that have divided America's allies and united its enemies. Bush was unable to produce convincing responses to Kerry's criticism not because the president lacks verbal dexterity but because there is no good answer to give. There is no credible way to explain what Kerry correctly called Bush's error of invading Iraq "without a plan to win the peace." When Kerry cited Bush's foolish disregard for the warning the Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, gave in public about the needed troop levels for Iraq -- and when Kerry alluded to the administration's vindictive early retirement of the general -- Bush had no explanation to offer, nowhere to hide. Kerry could have been clearer than he was on the meaning of Bush's failure to plan properly for the postwar period. Kerry did mention the calamitous decision to protect the Oil Ministry in Baghdad while leaving nuclear materials and secret-bearing files in other sensitive ministries unsecured. But Kerry missed a chance to explain how a long sequence of Bush blunders in Iraq -- starting with insufficient troop levels but including the dissolution of the Iraqi Army, the tolerance of widespread looting, and the obtuse refusal to cede sovereignty quickly to Iraqis -- invited the violent disorder that has descended upon Iraq. Kerry was justified in saying that the number one threat to US security is the danger that fissile material for use in a nuclear weapon could end up in terrorist hands. He was right to insist on accelerating the safeguarding or destruction of all such materials, and he was equally right to hold the president responsible for not negotiating a deal to freeze and dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program. This was doable, and Bush, in thrall to his administration's hawkish ideologues, has failed to do it.
Kerry was weakest when he had to pass from criticism of Bush to a presentation of his own positive ideas. He was no more persuasive than Bush when asserting that he could cajole unnamed allies into contributing troops to Iraq or doing more than they are currently doing to combat Islamist terrorist networks. Still, it was a boon for the country that Thursday's debate obliged the challenger as well as the incumbent to abjure their marketing Merlins and become accountable to the voters. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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