Kerry Condemns Bush for Failing to Back Aristide

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/politics/campaign/07KERR.html

March 7, 2004
In Sweeping Critique, Kerry Condemns Bush for Failing to Back Aristide
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

OUSTON, March 6 — Had he been sitting in the Oval Office last weekend as rebel
forces were threatening to enter Port-au-Prince, Senator John Kerry says he
would have sent an international force to protect Haiti's widely disliked
elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period," Mr. Kerry
said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush, who talks of
supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any aid and then helped
spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the United States could not
protect him.

"Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong," Mr. Kerry said.
But Washington "had understandings in the region about the right of a
democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think
it's a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it's shortsighted."

Mr. Kerry's critique on Haiti, which Bush campaign aides dismissed as
political, was emblematic of how he is already using national security issues
in his head-to-head contest with the president.

Mr. Kerry hop-scotched around the world in an hourlong interview to cast doubt
on Mr. Bush's judgment beyond their differences on Iraq, questioning his
handling of North Korea, the Mideast peace process and the spread of nuclear
weapons, and the Bush strategy that makes pre-emption a declared central tenet
of American policy.

Mr. Kerry is trying a bit of election-season pre-emption of his own,
attempting to short-circuit the White House argument that he is too much of a
straddler, too indecisive and too captivated by the nuances of foreign policy
to defend American interests.

"People will know I'm tough and I'm prepared to do what is necessary to defend
the United States of America, and that includes the unilateral deployment of
troops if necessary," said Mr. Kerry, who has rarely used the word
"unilateral" in the campaign except to describe how Mr. Bush has alienated
allies. "But my standard is very different from George Bush's."

But so far, Mr. Kerry has not described that standard in detail. In the
interview on his plane, his first in depth on foreign affairs since
effectively winning the Democratic nomination, Mr. Kerry said he was reluctant
to define how he would act in specific situations — particularly in murky
cases like Pakistan — because conditions could change by next year.

Yet, signaling how he plans to use the questionable intelligence about Iraq to
chip away Mr. Bush's credibility, he added later that if he committed troops
to battle, he would do it with "full disclosure and full vetting of the
intelligence to the American people."

But the core of Mr. Kerry's argument in the interview was that divisions
within Mr. Bush's foreign policy team have frozen the art of preventative
diplomacy and kept Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from doing his job.

"I think simply Powell — who I know, like and admire — has been never
permitted to be fully a secretary of state in the way that I envision the
secretary of state," he said, describing how he believes that Mr. Powell has
been regularly undercut by the administration's more hawkish members, led by
Vice President Dick Cheney. "I think Powell — I'm not sure they didn't lock
the keys to the airplane up sometimes."

Mr. Kerry warms to these topics in a way he never quite seems to when talking
about his multi-step plans to revive health care or roll back parts of
President Bush's tax cuts.

Years on the Senate Foreign Relations committee have given him a fluidity in
talking about the world's hot spots; on Friday he spoke of his long tutorials
about China with Lee Kwan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore
and now its senior minister; and slipped in a reference to conversations with
world leaders he engaged in at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, an exclusive event where he used to be a regular attendee.

He says he might take a foreign trip during the campaign — he would not say
where — an event that would emphasize a diplomatic style distinctly different
than President Bush's.

Yet some members of his growing foreign policy team — some days it seems as if
every former Clinton administration aide is now scrambling to climb aboard,
forgetting their brief dalliances with Mr. Kerry's former primary rivals —
worry that such talk could backfire on the campaign trail. Mr. Kerry, they
concede, still has a hard time mustering the clear, declarative sentences and
bedrock precepts that have become Mr. Bush's trademark.

"It's hard to imagine John banging his fist and declaring that countries are
"either with us or against us," said one adviser that the Massachusetts
senator talks to frequently. "Is that good or bad in the general election? We
don't know."

Moreover, Mr. Kerry clearly has not yet mastered the Clintonian knack of
engagingly breaking down complex problems into simple, accessible terms, no
matter his audience. On the campaign trail he regularly indicts the
administration's "arrogant, inept, reckless, ideological" foreign policy and
warns that "even the United States of America needs a few friends on this planet."

But when pressed for details, Mr. Kerry's remarks can veer into the dry,
Latin-phrase-heavy jargon of policy journals.

He is trying, though, to speak in far more concrete terms. In a radio address
broadcast Saturday morning, a response to Mr. Bush's weekly radio commentary,
Mr. Kerry dwelled at length on the stories of American military units
scrounging for private donations of steel plates for their Humvees and body
armor before they deploy to Iraq. "This administration has given billions to
Halliburton and requested $82 million to protect Iraq's 36 miles of
coastline," he said. "But they call this basic body armor a `nonpriority' item."

In turn, the Bush campaign is scouring his voting record for evidence of
weapons systems Mr. Kerry has sought to kill, and it is whispering to
reporters about the contrast between Mr. Kerry's desire to shrink the
intelligence services after the cold war and his declarations today that they
are unprepared for the task of combating terrorism.

But to talk to Mr. Bush's national security advisers and then to Mr. Kerry is
to hear a very different description of the current state of America's
influence in the world. For example, Condoleezza Rice, the national security
adviser, argued recently that the decision to confront Saddam Hussein sent
such a strong message worldwide that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan
leader, agreed to surrender his nuclear and chemical weapons. In turn, she
contended, that helped unwind the nuclear proliferation network built by the
Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Mr. Kerry waves that argument away: "Everybody who knows anything about Libya
and Qaddafi knows that is not what brought him around. They will claim it,
they want the linkage, but it is not true, like much of what they say." He
added, "that deal was on the table several years ago" as Libya sought to
settle the Pan Am 103 terrorism case. "No matter how much they bluster and
futz, they can't fake it."

But in several cases Mr. Kerry declined to say how he would handle some of the
stickiest issues: whether to reward Pakistan for its aid against Al Qaeda, for
example, or punish it for failing to crack down on what was clearly one of the
world's most dangerous nuclear proliferation networks, based in its own
nuclear laboratories.

He said, however, he had no confidence in the White House's assurances that
Pakistan's nuclear weapons were secure from terrorists.

Sooner or later, though, Mr. Kerry returns the conversation to the touchstone
of his early adult life, Vietnam. He compared the Bush administration's
participation in the exile of Mr. Aristide last weekend to the coup four
decades ago that ousted another unpopular authoritarian leader: President Ngo
Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Mr. Bush's more hawkish aides, he argued, have
failed to learn how the efforts to change a region's dynamics by changing its
government almost always backfire.

In Haiti's case, he contends that if he had been in Mr. Bush's shoes, "I would
not have allowed it to arrive at where it was," with mobs roaming the streets
of Haiti's cities.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, dismissed Mr. Kerry's
remarks about Haiti without directly responding to them. "During the crisis,
Senator Kerry consistently played politics with his various statements, and he
continues to play politics today," Mr. Schmidt said.

Mr. Bush's aides, led by Mr. Powell, say Mr. Kerry's critiques are a
distortion of the administration's efforts. The crisis grew from Mr.
Aristide's own actions and his sponsorship of the marauding gangs, Mr. Powell
said last week, and the United States decided not to prop him up after he had
lost his legitimacy.

Mr. Kerry charges that a similar lack of constant attention led the
administration to avoid dealing with the North Korean crisis for the first 18
months of Mr. Bush's presidency and that even now, Mr. Bush is unwilling to
engage in serious negotiations. It was an example, he said, of the president's
dealing first with the less threatening problem, Iraq, because it was the
easier to solve.

"There's a reason the Bush administration walked that backwards and chose
Iraq," he said. "And the reason is in the first eight hours of a conflict with
North Korea, you'd have over a million casualties, and they knew that in Iraq
you wouldn't."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


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