READY TO LEAD FROM DAY ONE...NO, TWO....NO, WAIT, THREE:

Does Kerry Have A Better Idea?: Mistakes were made going into Iraq, he says. He'd undo them (NANCY GIBBS, March 7, 2004, TIME)

Some questions seem so very simple. Senator Kerry, was the war in Iraq a mistake? Was it worth the cost? And now that we're in so deep, how do we get out? Like any good politician, John Kerry knows the value of simple answers. And like any other careful student of history, he knows the risks too, for some issues just won't let you get away with a yes or a no that you can live with forever.

And so he is an uncomfortable man right now—hoarse, tired, relieved, drinking something pink from a water bottle ("energy and vitamin C stuff," he says) and talking to TIME as he flies down to Florida, fresh off his Super Tuesday triumph. [...]

As for the gritty details—how many U.S. troops are needed in Iraq and for how long—Kerry tells TIME that he "almost certainly" will send a team to Iraq "within the next few weeks or months" to help him formulate the more detailed answers that will be demanded of a nominee. "I may ask some Democratic colleagues and experts to go to Iraq and make this assessment so I have a strong basis on which to proceed." He mentions Senate colleague Joseph Biden, chief campaign foreign-policy adviser Rand Beers and longtime Kerry Senate aide Nancy Stetson. Says White House communications director Dan Bartlett, Kerry's "mission to finally understand what is happening in Iraq reveals once again that [his] attacks are based on politics, not facts."

Whatever approach he embraces will have a better chance of success, Kerry argues, because he knows how to play well with others. In that he has much in common with President Bush—the first one, who in many ways he resembles: two war heroes of patrician bearing, solicitous of allies, multilateral by instinct, well wired through the world of international institutions. Kerry is offering a return to the Atlanticist foreign policy of the father instead of that of the son, who has charted a course that is more muscular, more unilateral, content to rely on coalitions of only "the willing." [...]

Kerry's lament is not that Bush puts too much faith in the military's hard power but that he puts too little in diplomacy's soft power. Kerry would expand the U.S. Army by 40,000 troops to put some give into a military stretched thin by its commitments worldwide. But the Senator's approach to the war on terrorism involves strengthening all the tools available. He says he would create a single chief of national intelligence to end the days of multiple watch lists and computers that don't talk to one another. He would come down harder on Saudi Arabia for propagating extremism and would "name and shame" countries and corporations that in any way help finance terrorists or launder their money. He would step up the war of ideas, the kind of public diplomacy that is meant to win hearts and minds in the parts of the world where anti-Americanism flourishes, but does not lay out a specific plan for doing so beyond more money on outreach.

As for the use of force, Kerry talks about exhausting all the alternatives first. That is what he says Bush failed to do in the weeks leading up to Iraq, at great cost. This is a source of particular anger because, Kerry says, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq to give Bush diplomatic leverage against Saddam Hussein, not a blank check. He says his decision was based on a clear promise from Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell that they would use force as a last resort and only with a broad coalition supporting it and that if they went to war, there would be a plan for what to do with Iraq once U.S. troops got to Baghdad. "This President broke every single promise that he made," Kerry charges, "and I'm going to hold him accountable for that."

Kerry also implies that one alternative was leaving Saddam in power. "I never doubted Saddam Hussein's untrustworthiness and willingness to try to dupe the world," he says. "But we did have a no-fly zone over two-thirds of the country, and we had the ongoing inspections. If we could contain Russia through the cold war, certainly we could have dealt more effectively with Saddam Hussein through the international community." Kerry does acknowledge that the U.S. and the world are better off with Saddam in prison. But he argues that the ends do not justify the means, and while he refuses to call the war a mistake, he certainly implies as much when he talks at length about the ways in which America is now "weaker." Bush's "arrogant, inept, reckless and ideological" foreign policy, he says, has cost the U.S. valuable friends and business abroad, inflamed Muslim radicals, distracted attention and resources from the hunt for al-Qaeda, and established a precedent we would not want to see other countries invoke.

Kerry sometimes presses his case too hard. He criticizes Bush for failing to get countries like Saudi Arabia to share the financial burden of the Iraq war, the way Bush's father did in Gulf War I, and suggests that their refusal calls into question the second war's legitimacy—even though the Saudis helped out back in 1991 because Saddam was threatening their oil fields. In December, Kerry asked why countries like Germany and France would cooperate in the war on terrorism "after having been publicly castigated and even ridiculed for disagreeing over Iraq." In fact, American counterterrorism officials say those two countries are among the U.S.'s most valuable allies, often better about cooperating than even the British, whose concern about civil liberties sometimes trumps security worries. Pressed on the point, Kerry folds. He says the lack of cooperation is elsewhere but is hard pressed to cite countries, finally mentioning "South Asia and the Middle East."

The Senator asserts that Bush's "foreign policy of triumphalism fuels the fire of jihadists." That's a difficult proposition to prove or disprove, since jihadists don't register their numbers or motivations. Asked to back his argument with proof, Kerry struggles, citing "people who brief us." Plainly dissatisfied with his answer, Kerry, half an hour after the interview, finds TIME's correspondents in the back of the campaign plane. To beef up his response, he cites the national intelligence estimate "in terms of the increasing strength and organizational structure" of al-Qaeda. He smiles and adds, "I just didn't want you to think I was ..." He gestures with his hand, as if plucking something from the air. But he doesn't say how anyone can definitively link al-Qaeda's strength to the war in Iraq.

If that had been televised it would be as deadly as Roger Mudd's interview with the Senator's mentor.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2004 8:33 AM