WASHINGTON, July 30 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was cruising through a Senate hearing on arms control, charming his Democratic adversaries and deftly parrying their questions, when Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, took the microphone.
In the aggressive style he honed as a prosecutor two decades ago, Mr. Kerry unleashed a barrage of criticism against President Bush's nuclear arms treaty with Russia, saying it "neutered" previous pacts and included a "huge contradiction." Twice, he interrupted a clearly irritated Mr. Powell in midsentence.
For many Democrats, the war on terrorism has made that kind of frontal assault on Bush foreign policy seem risky, if not politically suicidal. But not for Mr. Kerry. A decorated Vietnam veteran and potential presidential candidate, he has lustily attacked the administration on policies like trans-Atlantic relations, Pentagon spending, Middle East negotiations and even Mr. Bush's greatest triumph, Afghanistan.
"I think there were serious errors," Mr. Kerry said in an interview, referring to the American ground campaign in Afghanistan that he contends probably allowed Osama bin Laden to slip into Pakistan. He made the point again on Monday as he joined other potential presidential candidates in speaking to centrist Democrats in New York.
"In some ways, Al Qaeda is more dangerous today because we didn't take advantage of initiative, which is critical in war," he added.
Mr. Kerry says he has felt compelled to criticize the administration in large part because of his Vietnam experience, first as a gunboat commander and then as an antiwar organizer. "I learned what happens when people in public office fail to ask questions," he said.
But Republican and some Democratic officials say they see another motivation: Mr. Kerry's desire to separate himself from the pack in the Democratic sweepstakes for president. Attacking the president on war-related issues is nearly risk-free for him, those officials say, because his Vietnam experience makes it difficult to impugn his patriotism.
In that sense, Mr. Kerry, 58, shares a bond with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a close friend of Mr. Kerry's. There has been talk of Mr. McCain's joining a Kerry Democratic ticket in 2004, fueled by Mr. Kerry's plans to spend a weekend this fall at Mr. McCain's cabin near Sedona, Ariz. Both men's offices denied the rumors.
Many experts, seeking to articulate a worldview rooted in the internationalist traditions of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, have accused Mr. Bush of isolationism and of wasting opportunities to reduce tensions in the Mideast.
"This administration's tendency to act unilaterally weakens us in the world," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic group, articulating the emerging critique.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the party's leading candidates for 2004 should speak forcefully on military and foreign policy to avoid repeating what he considers a major error by Al Gore in the 2000 campaign. Mr. Gore did not talk about foreign policy "unless Bush brought it up, because his pollsters told him Americans didn't want to hear about it," Mr. O'Hanlon said, which "helped give credibility to Bush."
Few Democrats have answered that call, led by senators positioning themselves to run for president in 2004. Mr. Lieberman says the administration has not done enough to support Iraqi opposition groups. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina has criticized the administration for not helping expand an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.
But Mr. Kerry has been the harshest critic. In an interview addressing a range of issues, he called the Bush Mideast policies "confused," saying Mr. Bush could not expect to achieve peace without maintaining at least low-level contacts with Yasir Arafat. On Iraq, he said Mr. Bush had allowed "his rhetoric to get way ahead of his thinking," talking tough without preparing the country for a potentially bloody conflict. In 1991, Mr. Kerry joined most other Democrats in voting against letting Mr. Bush's father use force to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
He has been most scathing, however, on Afghanistan, arguing that the Pentagon's decision to rely on Afghan troops instead of American soldiers in the battle of Tora Bora in March probably allowed Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants to escape.
Asked who should be held accountable for the Tora Bora strategy, Mr. Kerry points to the president. "If you are the skipper of the ship, and the ship runs aground while you are asleep in your stateroom, you are relieved of duty, no excuse," he said.
After graduating from Yale, Mr. Kerry volunteered for the Navy and became commander of a patrol boat. He was awarded Silver and Bronze Stars, but he returned from Vietnam disillusioned. In the early 1970's, he helped organize Vietnam Veterans Against the War and captured national attention by throwing away some of his war ribbons -- but not his medals -- in an antiwar demonstration outside the Capitol.
The Vietnam experience also taught Mr. Kerry the dangers of instigating large military actions without public support, clear goals or a victory strategy, concerns he says he also has about the war on terrorism.
He said he "learned what happens when America pursues a military expedition without the support of the American people" and "what happens to soldiers in the military when you are not determined to win."
In one sign of how central the war experience is to Mr. Kerry's political persona, a model of his gunboat is displayed in the anteroom to his Capitol Hill suite, along with photographs of his crew.
His advisers say that if Mr. Kerry runs for president, he will not hesitate to highlight his war experience. Vietnam will not only give him credibility on military affairs but also insulate him from accusations that he is too liberal on issues like abortion or the environment, they say.
Mr. Kerry, acknowledging that many Democrats are more comfortable with domestic issues than foreign or military affairs, offered a solution: linking the two.
"I think there is no such thing anymore as foreign policy," he said. "It's all Main Street American policy. People are concerned about their economic security and they are concerned about their physical and national security. They are all linked together: interest rates, trade, international boundaries with respect to crime and terror, the movement of disease, the trafficking in people, immigration."
"It's an American policy," he added, "not a Democratic Party policy." |
