Bush exploits suffering of 9/11, says Carter by Oliver Burkeman, Marie Woolf, Marian Wilkinson.. The Guardian / The Independent 9:56am 26th Oct, 2004   "If one candidate's trying to scare you and the other one's trying to get you to think; if one candidate's appealing to your fears and the other one's appealing to your hopes -- you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope,"- Former US President Bill Clinton.    October 25, 2004 (The Guardian)    "Bush exploits suffering of 9/11, says Carter", by Oliver Burkeman.    George Bush has exploited the suffering of September 11 and turned back decades of efforts to make the world a safer place, the former president Jimmy Carter says in an interview with the Guardian published today.    Attacking Mr Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq, Mr Carter calls the war "a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements".    He also criticises Mr Bush for "lack of effort" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accuses him of abandoning nuclear non-proliferation initiatives championed by five presidents.    The US "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Mr Carter says.    "He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon know."    Mr Carter, 80, was president from 1977-1981, but did not win re-election amid the US hostage crisis in Iran. By comparison, support for Mr Bush's Iraq invasion is widespread, something Mr Carter attributes to a transformation in America's national mood.    "When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief," he says. "And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions."    Mr Bush and Mr Blair are blamed for helping to fuel the depth of anti-American feeling in the Islamic world. Denying any link between his handling of the Iranian crisis and the present threat, Mr Carter says: "The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, [there is] massive Islamic condemnation of the United States."    American media organisations, he adds, "have been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved".    On nuclear proliferation, the issue that the Democratic contender John Kerry has identified as the single most serious threat to national security, Mr Carter attacks Mr Bush for abandoning "all of those long, tedious negotiations" carried out by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and himself. In recent weeks he has also warned of the possibility of a new election fiasco in Florida..    October 26, 2004    "They keep on thinking it's the most powerful who deserve the most"- John Kerry. By David Halbfinger/ David Sanger (New York Times)    Democratic presidential challenger Senator John Kerry has used the Bible to accuse President George Bush of trying to scare America.    Appealing to swinging voters in explicitly religious terms, Senator Kerry said his own Catholicism moved him to help those in need. "The Scripture teaches us - John says, 'Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,' " Senator Kerry said, alluding to Mr Bush's strategy of portraying Senator Kerry as too weak to defend against a terrorist attack."What these folks want you to do is be afraid."    Rebuking one of the most openly religious presidents in recent history, Senator Kerry said that Christians believed in caring for the sick, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry and stopping violence, but that the Bush Administration was not heeding those teachings..    "This campaign is about more than a set of policies; it is about a set of ideals," he said, and then discussed the biblically based values at the root of his politics. At the center was the quote from the book of James that he used in the third debate: "It is not enough, my brother, to say you have faith when there are no deeds ... Faith without works is dead."    He emphasized seeking the common good and the moral obligation to care for the less fortunate. Senator Kerry's South Florida campaign came on a day when Mr Bush argued that the war of this generation could come to an end only under his leadership..The two candidates continued a series of sharp exchanges about who would prove tougher on terror - exchanges that have flared whenever either has acknowledged that eradicating terrorism altogether is highly unlikely.    In an interview on Saturday with a Fox News commentator, Mr Bush seemed to forget his lines briefly when he was asked whether the nation would always have to live with a terrorist threat. "Whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up - you know, is up in the air," Mr Bush said, according to a transcript. Senator Kerry pounced on the remark late in the day, telling thousands in Boca Raton: "You make me president of the United States, we're going to win the war on terror. It's not going to be up in the air whether or not we make America safe."    Senator Kerry said that Mr Bush had chosen profits for drug companies over lower prices for the elderly, and had spurned veterans and the unemployed while giving tax cuts to the rich. "Oh, no, they didn't choose the least among us, they chose the most powerful among us," he said. "They keep on thinking it's the most powerful who deserve the most, some kind of entitlement."    October 26, 2004    "Crying wolf, but Republicans' scary ads bite", Marian Wilkinson. (The Age)    Vote for us or your children will die - it's a pretty compelling message, and President George Bush has no qualms about it as he heads into the final week of this election in a neck-and-neck race with John Kerry.    The President may dance around the words, but there is no doubt about their subliminal meaning. Campaigning in Florida at the weekend, Bush warned: "The choice in this election cannot be clearer. You cannot lead our nation to the decisive victory on which the security of every American family depends if you do not see the true dangers of the post-September 11 world."    Weakness, Bush says repeatedly, will hound America if Kerry is elected on November 2, and anyone who votes for him is, by extension, throwing their family to the wolves.    Just in case any swinging voter has failed to grasp this, the Bush campaign has launched a scary new political commercial. It is perfectly timed, one week before Halloween, to turn up the fear factor several notches.The opening scene is a moonlit night in a dark forest where a pack of hungry wolves are eyeing the camera.    A serious-sounding female announcer intones: "In an increasingly dangerous world... even after the first terrorist attacks on America... John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations... cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defences... weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." On cue, wolves start skulking towards the camera, growling, waiting to pounce.    The commercial, like the President's speeches, are aimed squarely at the so-called, "security mums", a new voting block that the Republicans say has replaced the "soccer mums" who once supported Democrat president Bill Clinton and his economic program. After September 11, the security mum is now more worried about terrorism than job tenure..    Bush appears convinced that the message is working. In an interview with Fox News, due out today, the President repeated the warning that terrorists were still hoping to attack during the elections. "I don't want to alarm anybody because nothing is specific at this point in time," he told Fox, while agreeing that a nuclear, chemical or biological attack was still possible. "That's the biggest threat we face."    Kerry is trying to puncture this message by accusing the President of running a campaign based on visceral fear."I believe our future belongs to freedom, and not to fear," he said yesterday..    Whether wolves will succeed in herding nervous swinging voters into the Bush camp we will soon find out. But in this bitterly divisive election, it turns out even the wolves are not very happy about being used as a wedge issue.    A new website, Wolfpacks for Truth, inspired by a wit in the Kerry camp, cites the leader of the pack claiming they were misled into appearing in "this vicious campaign attack ad". According to a spokesman: "They told us they were shooting a Greenpeace commercial."    25 October 2004    "John Major: troops will be fighting for years", by Marie Woolf. (The Independent / UK)    John Major warned yesterday that British troops could be in Iraq for "many years" and predicted Britain was not even "near the beginning of the end".    The former prime minister, who led Britain against Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War, warned Britain would not trust Tony Blair to lead the country into another war. Mr Major was one of four Tory grandees to hit out against Tony Blair. "Many people ... would be very wary indeed of taking this Government's word on another occasion if a further military adventure seemed likely," he told the BBC's Breakfast with Frost.    Lord Heseltine, the former deputy leader accused Tony Blair of lying. "He has lied about the situation in the Middle East. We were told there was a threat," he said on ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby.    Lord Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary, said: "Saying we're going to bring about this honourable goal by killing large numbers of Iraqis and ... by getting rid of a tyranny and replacing it with chaos, civil war and terrorism, that's crazy and has now turned out to be crazy.
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