Bush’s 9/11 vs. Kerry’s Vietnam
Both Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and President Bush have had a searing life experience. For Kerry, it was the disaster of Vietnam. For Bush, Sept. 11, 2001. It makes all the difference in their foreign policy views.
While a valiant, decorated combatant, Kerry entered public life condemning the Vietnam War, and his career-long record is one of opposition to uses of American force and the weapons systems needed to carry them out. Bush, as he explained once again on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, has been “a war president” ever since terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on his watch.
The evidence suggests Bush may feel some responsibility, even guilt, for not doing enough to counter Al-Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001. Certainly, terrorism had no great priority. There was no “war” against it.
But once Sept. 11 happened, Bush’s whole presidency was transformed. He began to “worst case” world threats. Every intelligence service in the world believed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Former President Bill Clinton believed it. Even Kerry believed it.
And, Bush assumed it was only a matter of time before Hussein would use his WMD again, possibly by handing weapons off to terrorists. So, the president decided that Hussein had to be toppled.
To sell the country on that course, it now appears, he and his aides “cherry-picked” and exaggerated the intelligence, playing up the Iraqi threat and ignoring contrary claims.
Democrats and the anti-war media now are making much of a Defense Intelligence Agency warning that there was “no reliable information whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.” But they are cherry-picking, too. The abundance of the evidence was that a WMD arsenal existed.
While Kerry voted to authorize Bush to go to war after Kerry delivered a speech brimming with assertions that Iraq had WMD and represented “a grave threat,” the Senator also said, “I will not support a unilateral U.S. war … unless the threat is imminent and the multilateral effort (to disarm Iraq) has not proven possible under any circumstances.”
Referring to his Vietnam experience, Kerry told the Senate on Oct. 9, 2002, that “I know what it means to fight in a war where public consent is lost, where allies are in short supply, where conditions are hostile and the mission is ill-defined.”
It may be difficult for voters to know for sure right now, but there seems little question that Kerry’s Vietnam-based experience has led him to wrong choices in the past.
He voted against the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 even though Iraq had invaded a neighbor, the U.N. Security Council had voted to force a withdrawal and Bush’s father had formed a multinational alliance to carry it out.
In the 1980s, Kerry backed the nuclear freeze movement, which would have permitted the Soviet Union to retain missile dominance in Europe.
He recommended cutting $45 billion to $53 billion from the defense budget and vowed to “cancel” the MX missile, the B-1 bomber, the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Apache helicopter, the Patriot missile and four fighter aircraft programs.
So, does America choose a president this year who can’t get over Vietnam? Or one who can’t get over Sept. 11? Domestic choices and character choices have to be made, too, but surely more voters now share Bush’s trauma than Kerry’s.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)