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By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 1, 2004
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Not quite halfway into the debate on Thursday night, answering a question about the lessons of Iraq, President Bush repeated a line he uses so often on the campaign trail to justify his decision to invade: "The enemy attacked us," he said, and "we would rue the day" if the United States left Saddam Hussein in power.
Senator John Kerry was waiting for that moment. "Saddam Hussein didn't attack us," Mr. Kerry shot back. "Osama bin Laden attacked us." Mr. Bush, he said, had strengthened Al Qaeda with a war in Iraq that was a "diversion" in the broader war on terrorism.
With that exchange, the two men crystallized an argument that has bubbled along for months now, an argument over whether toppling Saddam Hussein was the right course or the wrong one for a nation suddenly confronted with a set of threats that were never aired during the last presidential campaign. It captured, in a moment of head-to-head clarity rarely seen in this campaign so far, the starkly different ways the Vietnam veteran and the sitting commander in chief view the question of when diplomacy has been exhausted, and how to focus the resources of a superpower that, for all its strength, cannot deploy its armies on every potential battlefield.
On everything from the question of whether the coalition that Mr. Bush put together to attack Iraq was truly a global alliance for a global war on terrorism or a Potemkin coalition of convenience, to whether Mr. Bush deserved credit for breaking up the world's most dangerous network of nuclear salesmen or has left bomb material lying around for terrorists to seize, the two men chose their facts to bolster their arguments for taking very different roads. Along the way, each rewrote recent history a bit.
That was clearest when they turned to the question of how to best to disarm North Korea, the slow-brewing crisis that bedeviled Mr. Bush's father and Bill Clinton, but appears to have taken a far graver turn on Mr. Bush's watch. Here, as in the case of Iraq, they spelled out clearly divergent views on whether it would be feasible to open bilateral talks with the North; Mr. Kerry favors it and Mr. Bush is opposed.
Mr. Bush made the case that he has a strategy to keep the diplomatic track all under control, if the country is just patient enough. Mr. Bush argued that he realized right away that a 1994 agreement between President Clinton and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, was falling apart, and he argued that he corralled China, Russia, Japan and South Korea into a unified front to confront the North.
"In Crawford, Tex., Jiang Zemin and I agree that the - a nuclear-weapons-free North peninsula, Korean peninsula, was in his interests and our interest and the world's interests," he said, referring to the visit of the former Chinese president to his ranch. In fact, by the time that agreement was reached, it was clear to both men that the Korean peninsula was not nuclear-free, and that the North probably already had one or two weapons.
Mr. Kerry argued repeatedly that North Korea posed a far greater threat than Iraq to the United States, but that Mr. Bush had failed to face up to that fact because of his single-minded pursuit of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Bush got off to the wrong start by failing to listen to his secretary of state in 2001, he argued, "and for two years, this administration didn't talk at all to North Korea."
Mr. Kerry had his facts right, but at the same time the C.I.A. was reporting to the White House that the North was cheating on its 1994 accord. When confronted with that evidence, the North threw out international inspectors.
Mr. Kerry argued that was Mr. Bush's fault though he never made clear what the president could have done differently to prevent the paranoid Mr. Kim from reacting in any other way.
And Mr. Bush, somewhat inexplicably, repeatedly made the case that as soon as Mr. Kerry began direct negotiations with North Korea, the negotiations with all of the North's Asian neighbors would fall apart. He never said why, and there are many examples in which the United States has negotiated with a nation in several different forums at the same time.
Mr. Bush said he hoped there would be no need for a future recourse to pre-emptive military action beyond Iraq, because diplomacy would suffice in diffusing future threats.
But neither he nor Mr. Kerry laid out their criteria for judging when diplomacy was no longer useful. And Mr. Kerry had a pragmatic critique, saying the Army had been so badly stretched that it could hardly take on new conflicts.
He said 9 of the Army's 10 active-duty divisions were either deployed to Iraq, returning from Iraq or retraining for a future role in the Iraq mission.
That statement about the Army's tempo is accurate if deployments to Afghanistan also are included. And, in fact, the one division apparently not included in Mr. Kerry's formulation - the Second Infantry Division in South Korea - recently sent about a brigade to Iraq.
Mr. Kerry argued with some force that Mr. Bush's policies not to seek greater allied support for the war in Iraq left the United States carrying an unnecessarily large share of the burden, having suffered, he said, about 90 percent of the casualties.
Mr. Kerry was apparently counting only foreign casualties in Iraq. While the United States has lost just over 1,000 military personnel killed during the mission, new Iraqi security forces also have suffered more than 700 deaths, according to Pentagon statistics.
Mr. Bush, who said American forces could leave Iraq only when the Iraqis were able to guarantee the government's security there, asserted that 100,000 Iraqi troops, police, border guards and other security forces had been trained and that the figure would hit 125,000 by the end of the year. He was slightly overstating the case; the State Department's Iraq weekly status report, dated Sept. 15, lists the total at 90,826. But more detailed estimates by the administration note that only a few thousand of the key personnel have completed thorough training courses, a point Mr. Kerry has repeatedly made but did not mention during the debate.
Mr. Kerry used a blitz of facts and figures to argue that the process of turning Iraq over to the Iraqis should have been speedier, and that as the he claimed repeatedly he would have sped the process by going into the war with realistic a plan for the post-war.
Mr. Bush defended himself against Mr. Kerry's argument that a summit of allies was a crucial step that had been ignored. "He says we ought to have a summit,'' Mr. Bush responded. "Well, there are summits being held,'' he said, including a donors' conference this month in Japan and another conference being planned that could include leading developed countries along with Iraq's neighbor states.
Arguing that the United States had borne far too great a burden compared to the rest of the world, Mr. Kerry repeatedly said that the war had cost American taxpayers $200 billion. There is little doubt that the war will eventually cost that much, but so far it has not. So far the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office put the cost of the war at $119 billion through the 2004 fiscal year, which ended Thursday. Mr. Bush argued that in countering proliferation, "Libya has disarmed'' and "the A. Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.'' He was right on the first claim; American officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency have shipped Libya's nuclear components out of the country. But it is far from clear that Mr. Khan's network is broken up. Many shipments that the Pakistani scientist's colleagues sent to Libya are still missing, and Mr. Khan himself has been pardoned by Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf.
Mr. Musharraf has refused to allow the United States or the agency to interrogate him, and said he would never allow such questioning. So far, Mr. Khan's only punishment has been an interruption of his profitable smuggling business.
But it was on Iraq that the two men kept circling back, marshalling numbers in hopes of convincing viewers that the other candidate's strategy was so flawed as to be useless.
Mr. Bush held to his contention that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, a statement he has made for nearly two years.
Mr. Kerry said, "Iraq is not even the center of the focus of the war on terror,'' a tone of derision in his voice. "The center is Afghanistan.''
October 3, 2004 at 09:58 AM in Iraq | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home