USA: John Kerry sees possibility of 'war with no end' in Iraq by The New York Times 11:41pm 21st Sep, 2004   September 21, 2004    "John Kerry sees possibility of war with no end". (Jodi Wilgoren, Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times. USA).    Senator John Kerry, charging President Bush on Monday with "stubborn incompetence" on the war in Iraq, made his most definitive statement yet that he would not have invaded when Bush did as he delivered a point-by-point indictment of the administration's Iraq policies.    "Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions, and, if we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight," Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, told an invited audience of party advocates at New York University.    "Today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way," Kerry said. "How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer, resoundingly, is no, because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe. "    While Kerry said Saddam Hussein "deserves his own special place in hell," he argued, "we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."    The 47-minute speech was Kerry's most stinging critique to date of what he called Bush's "colossal failures of judgment" on Iraq. Kerry also set out, as he has at other points in the campaign, four broad steps that he urged Bush to take immediately: repairing alliances, training Iraqi security forces, improving reconstruction and ensuring elections...    "It is not a question of staying the course but changing the course," Kerry said Monday, a line his aides repeated like a mantra all day. Speaking before a row of a dozen American flags, Kerry said that Bush had "misled, miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect" of the Iraq war, to the detriment of other terror hot spots.    He said that the president had "offered 23 different rationales for this war," which served only to confuse the public, and that the latest reasoning, that Iraq had the capability to develop nuclear weapons, would apply to 35 to 40 countries today.    "Is President Bush saying we should invade all of them?" he asked. "His miscalculations were not the equivalent of accounting errors, they were colossal failures of judgment. And judgment is what we look for in a president. "    Citing criticism of the administration's Iraq policy from leading Senate Republicans like Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Richard Lugar of Indiana and John McCain of Arizona, Kerry said, "We need to turn the page and make a fresh start in Iraq." The two men appeared to be describing different countries. Kerry spoke of an Iraq where deaths mount daily, raw sewage fills the streets, unemployment tops 50 percent and blackouts are routine. Bush said his administration was working with international partners, rebuilding the country's infrastructure, training Iraqi security forces and preparing for elections that he said would be held in January...    The Associated Press.    September 21, 2004    "Talking Sense, at Last, on Iraq". New York Times - Opinion.    After weeks of politically damaging delay, John Kerry finally seems to have found his voice on what ought to be the central issue of this year's election: the mismanaged war in Iraq and how to bring it to an acceptable conclusion. It was none too soon. While the fate of the Iraqi people, the success of the war on terrorism and America's international standing have all been teetering ominously in the balance, Mr. Kerry has allowed the presidential campaign to veer off into squabbles about events long past - like the candidates' 30-year-old war records - and about Mr. Kerry's confusing and sometimes contradictory recent statements on foreign policy.    Speaking in New York yesterday, Mr. Kerry laid out a well-grounded, intellectually straightforward and powerful critique of the Bush administration's past mistakes in Iraq. He gave a coherent explanation for his vote two years ago to authorize President Bush to use military force, making a clear distinction between how the White House should have used that authority to maximize international pressure against Saddam Hussein and the self-isolating course it actually followed. And, for the first time since becoming a presidential nominee, he explicitly said that he would never have supported the invasion of an Iraq that did not possess weapons of mass destruction.    Even more important, he linked his criticisms to a set of alternative policies, which, while not entirely new to those who have closely followed his campaign statements, offer the best chance for retrieving a situation that daily grows more dangerous for Iraqis, Americans and a volatile region. As Mr. Kerry correctly noted, "We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."    This should signal the start of the kind of serious and useful debate the American people deserve. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush still declines to even acknowledge the disastrous condition the war has fallen into, preferring simply to assert over and over that the course there is now firmly set for a democratic and stable future. Democrats who question these Pollyannaish projections are almost instantly slapped down as unpatriotic underminers of military morale.    That was the president's reflexive response to Mr. Kerry yesterday, coupled with the preposterous claim that Mr. Kerry's plan for a much more broadly internationalized effort is no different from the administration's own American-fought, American-paid-for and American-directed approach. It is encouraging to see that Republican foreign policy heavyweights like Senators Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar and John McCain are now also asking tough questions about the way the war is going. It is surely no service to America's brave fighting men and women, who know firsthand what they are facing, for Mr. Bush to pretend otherwise and to refuse to consider policy changes that might help them prevail and come home.    Turning things around at this late date will not be easy, but the president could make a beginning today, when he addresses an audience of world leaders at the United Nations. Mr. Kerry set the stage when he urged Mr. Bush to convene a summit meeting of those leaders to build a truly international effort to protect the elections, train Iraqi security forces and create a broader-based, more effective reconstruction effort.    Perhaps the presidential campaign is finally under way.
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