H.D.S. GREENWAY
Kerry must tread lightly on Iraq issueIT IS MORE than likely that the general election of 2004 will be decided on the issue of security and the war in Iraq. GOP strategist Karl Rove has recommended that Republicans run on the issue of terrorism, and the ability to keep the nation safe is the one area in which President Bush polls higher than his opponent, John Kerry.
Democrats know that they have to respond, but they have to proceed cautiously so as not to be seen as undermining efforts to defend the country. Only the impetuous Howard Dean was incautious enough to accuse the Bush administration of manipulating security alerts for political purposes. Kerry, quite properly, distanced himself from Dean on this. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said that his department doesn't do politics, but then he proceeded to do just that by saying how much the administration was doing to combat terrorism. Iraq is an area of Republican vulnerability, however. The Iraq war has gone just about as badly as possible. The Bush administration misled the nation on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda connection. They misled themselves about the nature of Iraqi resistance. Today the rebellion has spread from former Ba'athists and foreign jihadis to ordinary Iraqis who simply hate the occupation. The neoconservative dream that Bush has touted of Iraq becoming a bastion of Western-style democracy and an engine of change in the Middle East recedes before us like the will-o'-the-wisp it always was. It is impossible to overestimate how the administration's self-delusion on what would follow the fall of Baghdad has hurt this country's security. It seems inconceivable that the civilians who run the Pentagon should have been so swept up in their ideology as to ignore the State Department's expert advice on what to expect or that Iraq's postwar security should have been so badly bungled. Iraq has become the playing field for terrorists, and today the United States finds itself in the very quagmire Donald Rumsfeld scoffed at when he made the mistake of thinking the fall of Baghdad was the end of the war. John Kerry, however, is somewhat handicapped to take advantage of this mess by his odd combination of votes, first to support Bush's going to war and then against reconstruction aid. Bush has hammered his opponent for his confusing statements on his votes. Bush took the initiative last week in New Hampshire by demanding that Kerry give a yes-or-no answer to the question: Would he have gone to war "knowing what we know now" about weapons of mass destruction? Kerry doesn't do yes-or-no answers, any more than Bush does nuance. So Kerry asked in return why Bush had rushed to war on the basis of faulty intelligence, misleading the American people, without a plan to win the peace, and without sufficient allies? All good questions. But to the question Bush asked, Kerry said he would have voted to give Bush the authority to go to war, even if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, "because I believe it's the right authority for a president to have." Can it ever be right for a president to have the authority to go to war if it is known that the reasons for war are false? And isn't it the role of Congress to provide some checks and balance to presidential warmaking? And if Kerry believes that all presidents should have carte blanche authority to go to war, how does he explain his vote against the 1991 Gulf War when the reasons for going to war were straightforward and clear? Kerry can keep on attacking Bush on Iraq's failures. But he can only dig himself deeper if he starts debating Bush on Iraq's future. The last thing Kerry needs is to become mired in Iraq before he is elected. Kerry should say only that he cannot know what kind of dog's breakfast the Bush team will make of Iraq before he takes over in January, but, as Eisenhower said about the Korean War more than half a century ago, Kerry should say only that if elected he will go to Baghdad to straighten out the mess. He should ask of the American people: Do you believe Bush's handling of Iraq has made America safer?
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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