Kerry speech blasts Bush's 'unilateral preemption'
LOS ANGELES -- Democratic presidential front-runner John F. Kerry said yesterday that he would never let the United Nations or other countries prevent US military action "to protect our security, our people, and our vital interests," but said President Bush's policy of "unilateral preemption" had failed to win the war on terror and only fueled anti-American anger worldwide.
In what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address, crafted in part by former national security aides to President Clinton, Kerry described a world of deteriorating global conflicts, from Iraq to North Korea to the Middle East, and blasted "George Bush and his armchair hawks" with overextending US armed forces and caring more about buying new missile systems than providing body armor and state-of-the-art weaponry to troops.
Kerry offered some new ideas to bolster national security, such as appointing a Director of National Intelligence to oversee domestic and overseas activities and applying "tough financial sanctions" to countries like Saudi Arabia where terrorists funnel money, yet his plans mostly remained in outline form, such as an unspecified "major initiative of public diplomacy" to compete with religious schools and state-run media in Islamic countries that inveigh against the West.
The Massachusetts senator, who is looking to virtually clinch the nomination when 10 states vote on the upcoming Super Tuesday, also offered a bipartisan appeal to national sentiments about American perseverance, invoking Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy in rallying the country "to win this war we did not seek."
"Maybe there's no going back to the days before baggage checks and orange alerts -- maybe they're with us forever," Kerry told an audience of several hundred students, professors, and visitors at the University of California at Los Angeles. "But I don't believe they have to be. I grew up at a time of bomb shelters and air raid drills. But America had leaders of vision and courage in both parties. And today, the Cold War is memory, not reality."
Kerry did not offer specific solutions for the problems he identified, though he said the United States had a "solemn obligation to complete the mission" in Iraq and Afghanistan and should work with allies in the fight against terrorism. Calling that fight "a clash of civilization against chaos," he said US strategy depended largely on having "real and enduring alliances" with some 60 nations that are now home to terrorist cells and agents.
"Working with other countries in the war on terror is something we do for our sake, not theirs," Kerry said, in a 30-minute speech to which he hewed far more closely than usual, thanks to the use of a teleprompter. "We can't wipe out terrorist cells in places like Sweden, Canada, Spain, the Philippines, or Italy just by dropping in Green Berets."
Training his fire on Bush while ignoring his chief rival for the nomination, Senator John Edwards, Kerry positioned himself on several issues as a standard-bearer for the Democratic foreign policy establishment; indeed, former Clinton aides such as Samuel R. Berger and Richard Holbrooke helped craft the speech.
Kerry also accused the White House of allowing "election year" concerns to influence its timetable for handing back sovereignty to Iraqi officials this summer.
"We must -- and if I am president, I will -- apply the wisdom Franklin Roosevelt shared with the American people in a fireside chat in 1942: `It is useless to win battles if the cause for which we fight these battles is lost; it is useless to win a war unless it stays won,' " Kerry said. "This administration has not met that challenge; a Kerry administration will."
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Bush's reelection campaign, said yesterday that Kerry's speech "ignored the real progress being made on all fronts of the war on terror," and noted that Kerry opposed the $87 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that would provide the weapons to troops that Kerry said were being denied.
"This was a political speech filled with defeatist rhetoric and factual inaccuracies," Schmidt said. Three hours before the speech, a line of students, professors, and others began looping through UCLA's verdant sculpture garden until it was so long that campaign aides told dozens of people at the end that they had no hope of getting a seat. Among those who stayed put anyway, freshman Eduardo Saldivar described himself as a "former Deaniac" -- a hard-core supporter of ex-candidate Howard Dean -- who came not just to hear Kerry's views but also to glean a better sense of him as a man.
"I want to see more of his human side, more sincerity than I've seen so far," said Saldivar.
The earliest arrivals in line included two political science majors who planned to vote for President Bush but came out to assess Kerry's resolve about strengthening national security.
"It's curiosity and knowing where your enemy stands," said Melissa M. Carson, a senior from Los Angeles.
Carson's classmate, Eric W. Zdenek, was more open than Carson to switching allegiance from Bush to Kerry, but expressed concern that the senator might not take the hard line that won results like Libya's recently bowing to American pressure and beginning to dismantle its chief weapons programs.
"I want someone in the White House who won't just impose a UN resolution or a trade embargo when things get tough," Zdenek said. "There needs to be actual credibility behind US foreign policy."
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
