... and the view of the campaign & issues in today's AGE, written by Oz correspondent in the US, Marion Wilkinson:
The verdict
October 30, 2004
On George Bush's watch, 3000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks. More than 1000 American soldiers have died in Iraq and the "war on terror" goes on. The rest of the world would vote for John Kerry if it could. On Tuesday, Americans will make their judgement. Marian Wilkinson reports.
As the presidential race entered its last days, US Army veteran and former diplomat Ann White drove through the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio, on a mission. During her long military and foreign service career, White served in crisis spots around the globe, from Panama to Somalia. After the September 11 attacks, she volunteered to go to Afghanistan as part of the first team of diplomats who reopened the US embassy in Kabul.
With the fate of George Bush hanging in the balance, she arrived in Ohio, one of the most closely contested states in next Tuesday's election (Wednesday Melbourne time). She was not here to campaign for her President. She was sharing a podium with Michael Moore, maker of the film Fahrenheit 9/11, to speak out against the Iraq war. She resigned from her diplomatic post the day the war started.
In the latter stages of this divisive and riveting presidential campaign, every issue from the economy to gay marriage has been forced into the background - except one. Has Bush, who led the country after the traumatic September 11 attacks and then launched the invasion and occupation of Iraq, earned the right to remain as America's commander-in-chief?
White has no doubt this question is weighing on voters' minds as they prepare to cast their ballots. "It is unbelievable, the outpouring of concern and interest that people have in the war," she says.
Her alarm about the President's decision-making in the war began in Kabul. "I saw the diversion of resources to Iraq. We never got the numbers of military folks we needed in Afghanistan, we never had enough people to send out to the population centres."
Bush is now almost constantly on the defensive over Iraq. Months of negative news are taking their toll.White is the first to admit that many Americans think she's talking "hogwash", as she puts it. "I think the country is pretty split on this."
Although more than half of voters are concerned about the direction their country is taking, just as many are worried that Bush's rival, John Kerry, is too weak to take his place as commander-in-chief with the country at war.
On the day White was in Ohio, 200 friends and relatives of September 11 victims joined together in a powerful plea for Bush's re-election. All of them backed his decision to invade Iraq as vital to the war on terror.
"President Bush articulated the primary lesson of September 11, that simply reacting to danger after lives are lost is a weak and unacceptable (national) defence," they wrote in an open letter to voters that was released by the Bush campaign.
"We believe that taking the fight to the enemy is the best way to ensure that the enemy will not bring death to our doorstep here at home.
We are deeply grateful to President Bush," the letter continued, describing him as a leader "who rallied this nation on that dark September day, who has earned our respect and confidence and whose leadership we trust to steer this country on the right path."
What is striking about the letter is not just the pain in the words, but the implicit recognition that on the eve of the first election since September 11, Bush is fighting for his political survival. Gone is the broad political support for the unifying heroic leader who stood in the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers in New York.
The polls from September 11 to today reflect this reality. In the weeks following the attacks that killed almost 3000 people, Americans rallied behind Bush, sending his job approval ratings soaring to 85 per cent. During the war in Afghanistan and economic recession, that approval never dipped below 70 per cent; it did when the first debates began over Iraq in the middle of 2002.
Today, Bush's job approval ratings are hovering just below 50 per cent in many polls. His support is below what it was before September 11 and back to where it was in November 2000, when he barely won the election by 537 votes in Florida.
The war in Iraq is greatly responsible for the collapse in his support. With each crisis in Iraq, from the first suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad to the recent brutal beheadings, his backing has eroded. The war has finally opened up a route for Kerry to challenge Bush.
In Iowa, another crucial state, Kerry slammed Bush, as he has repeatedly this week, over reports that nearly 400 tonnes of explosives were looted from Iraq at the time of the US invasion. "What do we hear now from this President on this important matter of national security?" Kerry asked in front of his supporters. "Not a single explanation of how this could have happened or what the US Government is doing to address it. That's not leadership. It's not how the commander-in-chief is supposed to lead. It's not what our troops on the ground deserve."
Bush hit back by once again accusing Kerry of "flip-flopping" on the war, turning up his criticism only when the war became unpopular.
"Senator Kerry has taken a lot of different positions but he rarely takes stands," Bush said at a rally in Ohio. "The President must not follow the path of the latest polls. The President must lead based on conviction and conscience. Especially at a time of war, mixed signals only confuse our friends (and) embolden our enemies."
But Bush is now almost constantly on the defensive over Iraq. Months of negative news are taking their toll. Images of American solders with limbs blown off by roadside bombs; images of a naked prisoner led on a leash by a female soldier, or hooded and caped, with wires trailing from his fingers; images of hostage Nicholas Berg being beheaded by the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; images of Iraqi children blown to pieces as they arrived to receive lollies from soldiers are all now locked in America's consciousness.
So, too, is the image of Charles Duelfer, America's chief weapons inspector, when he appeared before the Senate last month, stripping away Bush's key rationale for the war. Duelfer acknowledged that the CIA, the US military and its allies could find no stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq.
On the campaign hustings, Bush is admitting no mistakes over Iraq. But the shattered reputations of his national security team tell a different story. His loyal CIA chief, George Tenet, resigned under pressure before the first damning reports on the failure of intelligence on the prewar weapons of mass destruction became public. Some tip Secretary of State Colin Powell to leave even if Bush wins the election, after being all but side-lined during the rush to war.
The two men most responsible for the prosecution of the war and its aftermath, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are openly criticised within the Republican Congress and the conservative media. Security analyst James Mann, whose book Rise of the Vulcans charted the unleashing of their neo-conservative vision, believes both are now diminished in Washington.
"Whatever their original mission was, the past year-and-a-half in Iraq has shown there were at least major problems with the execution of their vision, if not the vision itself," he told The Age.
"It's hurt Wolfowitz the most, because of all the Vulcans, he's the one most closely identified with the decision to go to war in Iraq, and, more importantly, with direct responsibility for Iraq after the war."
Mann believes Wolfowitz is also likely to resign along with Rumsfeld even if Bush wins.
Since the explosion of the Iraqi insurgency in April this year, Bush has been under pressure over the Pentagon's refusal to admit there were insufficient troops on the ground to secure Iraq after the invasion. Critics from the right pinpoint the looting of the country in the first weeks of the occupation as the launch of the insurgency.
At the time, Rumsfeld memorably brushed the looting off as the price of liberation. "Stuff happens," he said. "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and bad things."
Kerry's most potent attack on Bush focuses on the President's refusal to acknowledge the mistakes in Iraq. He cites a former adviser to Iraq's interim administration, Larry Diamond, who wrote a devastating critique of the postwar plans. Diamond called the looting not a one-time breakdown in social order, "but an elaborately organised, armed and financed resistance to the US occupation".
Diamond listed disbanding of the Iraqi army, the failed bid to install expat Ahmed Chalabi as leader and a lack of troops as evidence that, "hubris and ideology" had replaced serious strategic planning in the Bush Administration. "The naive assumptions quickly collapsed along with overall security in the immediate aftermath of the war," Diamond wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs. But by then, the Iraqi insurgency had taken root.
Despite the growing security crisis in Iraq this year, Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, continued to base their re-election strategy squarely on Bush's leadership as commander-in-chief. The overriding message was that only Bush could keep America safe. The campaign showed no panic when Bush's poll numbers continued to slump and Kerry's rose in July after the Democratic Party convention in Boston.
Kerry had effectively challenged Bush on bread and butter issues such as health care at the convention, but barely laid a glove on him over Iraq or terrorism. Conflicted over his own early Senate vote backing the war, Kerry relied on his record as a Vietnam veteran to bolster his national security credentials. In a telling aside in a Boston bar, former president Bill Clinton was reportedly overheard saying he wondered if Kerry had the "cojones", the balls, to take on Bush.
By late August, Bush and Rove's strategy looked vindicated. At the Republican convention in New York, just a few kilometres from the site of the Twin Towers, Bush was wrapped in the heroism and sacrifice of September 11 as grieving relatives, New York firefighters, police and the Republican former mayor of the city, Rudy Guiliani, all testified to his steadfast courage and strength.
By contrast, almost every speaker savagely attacked Kerry's national security credentials. As hundreds of cheering Republican delegates chanted taunts of "flip flop" whenever Kerry's name was mentioned, Bush told them, "If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift towards tragedy. This will not happen on my watch."
Bush's poll ratings began to climb back up almost immediately and Kerry's campaign went into convulsions. After crisis talks with Clinton, Kerry finally decided he had to seriously challenge Bush over Iraq.
At the end of September, during the first presidential debate, Democrats and Republicans watched stunned as Kerry put Bush on the defensive over the war. Accusing Bush of a "colossal failure of judgement" in his rush to war, Kerry alleged a litany of mistakes. While Bush tried to fend him off with the charge of flip-flopping on the war, Kerry countered that Bush could not admit his mistakes. "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong," Kerry said.
With the campaign in its last days, Kerry is now hammering Bush over Iraq at every rally. His attacks have not only helped pare away Bush's post-convention lead, but have energised his own supporters. Both men are now neck-and-neck in the polls. Whoever becomes America's next commander-in-chief will face an unprecedented series of challenges in the Middle East - Islamic fundamentalism, the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (made more complicated with the possible death of Yasser Arafat) and the looming nuclear crisis over Iran that could trigger an arms race in the region.
But the immediate test will be Iraq.
Tuesday's vote will ultimately be read as a referendum on the war. As national security writer Thomas Powers put it, Bush's defeat would signal to the world and the Republicans that his decision to go to war had been rejected by the country as unjustified and unwise. His victory, on the other hand, would transform the conflict from Bush's war into America's war.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/29/1099028206858.html?from=moreStories
Thank you!
