Kennedy keeps drumbeat on Bush, Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Senator Edward M. Kennedy yesterday again led the charge for Democrats in criticizing President Bush's Iraq policies, declaring Bush's intense focus on Iraq has impeded the fight against nuclear proliferation and allowed North Korea and Iran to continue their nuclear programs without restraint.

Kennedy has been the Democrats' stalking horse in building the party's case against Bush's Iraq policies, putting forth arguments that sometimes find their way into the presidential campaign of his Massachusetts colleague, John F. Kerry. In April, he set off a round of comparisons when he declared the Iraq war "Bush's Vietnam."

Yesterday, speaking before a nuclear nonproliferation conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kennedy again went further than Kerry in declaring Bush's Iraq policies an impediment to the larger fight against terrorism.

"The negligence of the Bush administration is even more startling when you consider two of the nations involved -- North Korea and Iran," Kennedy said. "But instead of leading the world against these real threats, the president chose to lead America alone into the quicksand to counter the mirage of a threat in Iraq."

The Bush campaign rejected Kennedy's assertions, calling the senator an "attack dog for Kerry."

Kennedy, for his part, offered his own prescriptions for countering the threat of nuclear terror. He called for a new plan for North Korean disarmament, "based on sequential, measurable, and verifiable steps, with incentives at the completion of each step." Currently, the Bush administration is a party to multinational talks on North Korean disarmament, but has been reluctant to trade favors for disarmament.

Kennedy also vowed to continue his fight against the administration's proposals for a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons, so-called bunker busters. He called the administration's plans an impediment to persuading smaller nations to give up their nuclear ambitions, quoting Mohammed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as saying, "there are some who have continued to dangle a cigarette from their mouth and tell everybody else not to smoke."

Kennedy also called for more spending on the Nunn-Lugar program to purchase insufficiently secured nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union, and for a harder line on Pakistan, whose leading nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, recently admitted selling secrets on the international black market.

All of Kennedy's proposals echo similar plans set out by Kerry in a speech June 1 in West Palm Beach, Fla. But Kerry's address referred only in passing to the Bush administration's "fixation" with Iraq and did not say it was responsible for furthering nuclear proliferation.

Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, disputed Kennedy's claim that the administration hasn't worked hard enough to secure loose nuclear materials.

"Senator Kennedy ignores that the Bush administration has fully funded Nunn-Lugar proposals and it also is working with the G-8 nations to come up with proposals to end the spread of nuclear weapons," Holt said. "The Bush administration has put nuclear proliferation front and center in its relationship with G-8 partners."

Holt also accused Kennedy of working in concert with the Kerry campaign, trying to damage Bush by making charges that are too inflammatory to come from the candidate himself.

"John Kerry has appointed Ted Kennedy to be his attack dog, and Kerry and Kennedy share a world view that's out of the mainstream of the American people," Holt said. "Neither John Kerry nor Ted Kennedy understands the threat this country faces in the global war on terror. This goes back to the fight against the Soviet Union. Neither Kerry nor Kennedy understood that peace through strength was the way to fight communism."

Kennedy, for his part, blasted the Bush administration for abandoning the commitment to nuclear disarmament that he believes reduced the tensions of the Cold War, referring to his brother President John F. Kennedy's efforts to cut nuclear arms after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"Surviving the brink underscored in my brother's mind the necessity of cooperation, even with the most difficult adversary, so that no American president would ever again be faced with the same impossible dilemma," Kennedy said.

His voice rising to a thunderous bellow and falling to a ridiculing mewl, Kennedy seemed to relish his role as attacker: On the most important issue of the times, he said, the Bush administration has been absent and distracted.

"The Bush administration's unilateralism and its single-minded focus on Iraq have severely undermined this all-important enterprise," he said, referring to decades of arms-control agreements. "The result has been a serious setback for our nonproliferation policy, and may very well have made Al Qaeda terrorists even more determined to find a way to make a nuclear attack on America."