REALITY CHECK; CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

PHILIP GOUREVITCH. The New Yorker.

 

Despite a pre-debate "memorandum of understanding" between the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign that there would be no televised "cutaways" or reaction shots, more than sixty-two million Americans watched George W. Bush appear to come unglued while hearing, for the first time, John Kerry's forceful voice of opposition.

Bush's face betrayed him on the very first cutaway. He had insisted that the focus of his initial encounter with Kerry, in Coral Gables, Florida, be foreign policy and national security--the issues on which, as a self-proclaimed "war President," he believes himself to be strongest, and on which he has staked his bid for a second term--yet, barely a minute into the debate, he had been subjected to more direct criticism than he had endured in public in the previous four years, and it soon became obvious that he couldn't take it. A coin toss had earned Kerry the opening question--"Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?"--and, with his answer, he established a command of the room that he never relinquished. "Yes, I do," Kerry said. "I believe America is safest and strongest when we are leading the world and we are leading strong alliances. I'll never give a veto to any country over our security. But I also know how to lead those alliances. This President has left them in shatters across the globe, and we're now ninety per cent of the casualties in Iraq and ninety per cent of the costs. I think that's wrong, and I think we can do better." Kerry spoke with confidence and a newfound crispness, and, as he went on, there was Bush on the split screen, looking irked and puckered.

The President held his head slightly cocked and low to his shoulders, and his expressions kept shifting, in increments of wincing aggravation--lips drawn tight and downward, nostrils flaring and flattening, eyebrows wriggling--through a range of attitudes: impatience, boredom, indignation, sourness, imperiousness, contempt. This unhappy twitchiness persisted through the evening, as Kerry, the former prosecutor, laid out with cool composure the case for firing Bush, and established his own credibility as a Presidential replacement. Bush, even when he had the floor, grimaced as he spoke, except on several occasions when he lost his way and a look of total erasure came over him, a blank, stricken stare for which the French, alas, have the most apt expression: like a cow watching a train go by.

You didn't need to be rooting for Bush to be distressed by the spectacle of his discombobulation. You needed only to care for the Republic. Bush takes credit for "changing the world," and there's no question that in leading the country to war in Iraq he has altered the international political landscape, and America's position in it, more than anyone in nearly half a century. The Republican domination of both houses of Congress has allowed him to do this almost by fiat, without domestic political resistance or accountability. At the White House, too, Bush is ferociously insulated from exposure to opinions that deviate from the party line. He does not like to be questioned and has little use for argument. Logic has never been his strong suit; in justifying his policies and actions, he prefers stonewalling (admit no error, and ignore or deny bad news) and tautology (I do what's right because it's right, and it's right because I do it). Now, faced for the first time in his Presidency with an inescapable adversary, he appeared to experience the debate as an insult. At times he sulked, at times he winced, as Kerry picked apart the Administration's catastrophic Iraq adventure. "I didn't need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations," Bush protested. "I decided to go there myself." And, a bit later, "Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that."

Bush had been favored to win the foreign-policy debate, and since for a month he had enjoyed a solid lead in the polls, reporters arrived in Coral Gables prepared to write Kerry's political obituary with a local dateline. An election campaign is largely an affair of competitive storytelling, and Bush is an ingenious sketch artist: just as he had convinced the press and the public that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, he succeeded, in the late summer, in spinning such a web of confusion out of selective repetition of Kerry's caveat-laden statements on Iraq that his caricature of Kerry became the prevailing view.

But Kerry's strong performance was less surprising than Bush's wipeout. Although most TV viewers had not heard Kerry speak at length about Iraq before, his comeback from a late-summer slump had begun two weeks earlier, on September 16th, at the annual convention of the National Guard Association in Las Vegas. Bush, addressing the gathering earlier in the week, had delivered a glowing review of the war in Iraq and the broader war on terror, and was frequently interrupted by standing ovations. Now it was Kerry's turn, and, by way of pre-speech spin, his spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, told reporters on his campaign plane during the flight to Nevada to expect an overwhelmingly Republican audience of active-duty servicemen and women who might boo upon hearing their Commander-in-Chief criticized.

"Two days ago, President Bush came before you and you received him well, as you should," Kerry told the National Guard. "But I believe he failed the fundamental test of leadership. He failed to tell you the truth." Nobody booed and nobody clapped, and Kerry went on, "The President stood right where I'm standing and did not even acknowledge that more than a thousand men and women have lost their lives in Iraq. He did not tell you that with each passing day we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings. He did not tell you that with each passing week our enemies are getting bolder--that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists. He did not tell you that with each passing month stability and security seem farther and farther away. He did not tell you any of this, even though--as the country learned today in the New York Times--his own intelligence officials have warned him for weeks that the mission in Iraq is in serious trouble. But that is the truth--hard as it is to hear. You deserve a President who will not play politics with national security, who will not ignore his own intelligence, while living in a fantasy world of spin."

The President's conduct of the war was defined by "serious mistakes" and "wrong choices" from the outset, Kerry said. "And, perhaps worst of all, the mess in Iraq has set us back--way back--in the war on terror. The simple fact is, when it comes to the war on terror, George W. Bush has taken his eye off the ball." Kerry said that he would have done "almost everything differently," but he insisted that it was not too late to correct the damage done by Bush's bad leadership. When he finished, at least half the audience stood and clapped, albeit briefly.

A few days later, at New York University, Kerry delivered another major speech on the war. "The President now admits to 'miscalculations' in Iraq," he said. "That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment--and judgment is what we look for in a President." The war had made America weaker, he said, and less safe. "Yet, today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" And on September 24th, in Philadelphia, Kerry took the war on terrorism as his theme. "The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy--Al Qaeda," Kerry said. "George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority. As President, I will finish the job in Iraq and refocus our energies on the real war on terror."

In these speeches, staggered over eight days, Kerry managed to come across both as anti-war and as a hawk on terrorism--a remarkable political balancing act. He spoke of winning in Iraq, recommitting to Afghanistan, bolstering homeland security, reviving alliances, waging a peaceful war of ideas to tame extremism in the Muslim world, and hunting down Osama bin Laden. His "plan" for Iraq was as sketchy as it was ambitious--bring in allies, step up training, intensify reconstruction, foster and recruit a United Nations protection force to make elections possible, and, if successful, begin to withdraw American forces within a year. Kerry did not pretend that it would be easy to get other countries to help him realize these ends. "But I have news for President Bush," he said. "Just because you can't do something doesn't mean it can't be done."

Kerry's focus on war and terrorism was strategically timed to lead up to the first debate, and, more immediately, to overshadow Bush's address to the U.N. General Assembly, in New York, and the state visit to Washington of Iraq's American-installed interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (whose morning-in-Iraq rhetoric in an address to Congress might as well have been drafted by a Bush-campaign speechwriter). Kerry's preemptive strategy was successful: at a Rose Garden press conference with Allawi, Bush was repeatedly asked, with reference to Kerry's charges, how he accounted for the discrepancies between his triumphalist claims about the pacification and democratization of Iraq and the anarchic scenes of battle, bombardment, carnage, and beheading that filled the news. For the first time since the Democratic Convention, at the end of July, Kerry was setting the agenda for the nation's political press, and he was doing it by speaking substantively to the all-dominating issue of this election year. "He's wanted to give that speech for a long time," Stephanie Cutter told me after Kerry delivered his withering assessment of Bush's war policy, and Senator Joseph Biden said that Kerry had told him, "I feel liberated."

"Because guess what?" Biden said to a half-dozen reporters who were standing around after an outdoor Kerry rally in Philadelphia. "Bush's strength on foreign policy is incredibly thin, shallow, and weak. It is. Factually." What's more, he said, "If John crosses that threshold on national security, this is over. Does anybody think George Bush has a plan for the economy and jobs? Does anybody think George Bush has a plan for health care? Does anybody think George Bush is actually going to spend more money on education?"

At that time, six days before the debate in Coral Gables, the suggestion that Bush might be vulnerable on Iraq or the war on terror was a kind of heresy. A wire-service reporter urged Biden to reconsider. Kerry's "core competencies," the reporter said, were the economy and health care. Wasn't Kerry just being opportunistic, now that Iraq was in the headlines? "No!" Biden shouted, and when the reporter persisted--"What if the beheadings aren't in the news in October?"--the Senator tipped back on his heels a moment, as if to get a better look at him, and said, "Hey, you are a real horse's ass, aren't you?" Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary, who has been travelling with Kerry since early September, stood nearby, jiggling with laughter. McCurry told me, "The subtext of this whole week was: If you think that George Bush's strength is foreign policy and national security, think again, then look at Kerry."

In the Coral Gables debate, as in Kerry's three mid-September speeches, the underlying message of his challenge to Bush's view of Iraq was: Let's get real. "We're making progress," Bush said several times during the debate, in response to Kerry's recitations of all the ways that "this incredible mess in Iraq" had gone from very bad to much worse. Bush had dismissed Kerry's speech in Las Vegas, by declaring, as he often does, "Freedom is on the march." Now he conceded, "In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard." He used the phrase "hard work" eleven times that evening, mostly to describe the war, and he said, "We're getting the job done." Kerry, who likes to point out that it is impossible to fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge, kept up the attack. "This President, I don't know if he sees what's really happened over there," he said, returning to the theme of his National Guard speech, and he added, "What I'm trying to do is just talk the truth to the American people and to the world. The truth is what good policy is based on. It's what leadership is based on." Bush rested his case on different values--staying "on the offensive," for instance--and he concluded, "By being steadfast and resolute, and strong, by keeping our word, by supporting our troops, we can achieve the peace we all want."

Steadfastness, however, seemed to be in shorter than usual supply within the Administration in the week after Coral Gables. Perhaps it was the onset of an election-year October--the political hurricane season--or perhaps just the relentlessness of the bad news from Iraq. There was Condoleezza Rice being forced by a newspaper article to admit she had been aware before the war that the true use of some aluminum tubes she once touted as proof of an Iraqi nuclear-arms program was actually a subject of dispute among intelligence experts. (In fact, at the time, senior nuclear experts in Bush's Energy Department doubted that the tubes had anything to do with nukes.) There was Donald Rumsfeld being asked at the Council on Foreign Relations about the supposed link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and responding, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." (Rumsfeld later claimed that he'd been misunderstood, but his answer was a model of unambiguous lucidity.) There was Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed former head of the Coalition Authority in Iraq, declaring--as John Kerry likes to say on the stump--that the Administration failed to send a sufficient number of troops. (Kerry, campaigning in Iowa, reacted to the news by saying, "I don't know if the President is constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the truth, I don't know if he's just so stubborn that he's going to go down.") There was a new C.I.A. report, which undermined the notion that the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi--who is blamed for many of the beheadings in Iraq--had ties to Saddam Hussein. (Vice-President Cheney, who had commissioned the report, chose to ignore its conclusions.) There was Iyad Allawi in Baghdad, back from the Rose Garden, sounding grim and embattled.

And there was, at last, a definitive report from the chief U.S. arms inspector for Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, which found that Saddam had had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and no active weapons programs in the period before Bush invaded. On the day that Duelfer's report was released, Bush--no doubt eager to blunt its impact and regain the campaign offensive--went to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to deliver what the White House billed as a "significant speech." In fact, the event was a campaign rally, Bush's favorite format, and the speech was a beefed-up stump speech, packed with all the lines he should have said in Coral Gables. After a recitation of his standard explanation for the Iraq war as integral to the war on terror, an act of punishment of Saddam's defiance that was necessitated by the experience of September 11th, Bush omitted his usual acknowledgment that weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq. Instead, he said, "I understand some Americans have strong concerns about our role in Iraq. I respect the fact that they take this issue seriously, because it is a serious matter." And then he invoked, once again, the tautological imperative: "I assure them we're in Iraq because I deeply believe it is necessary and right and critical to the outcome of the war on terror."

So we are there because he believes. As for Kerry, Bush said, "In our debate, he once again came down firmly on every side of the Iraq war. He stated that Saddam Hussein was a threat and that America had no business removing that threat. Senator Kerry said our soldiers and marines are not fighting for a mistake--but also called the liberation of Iraq a 'colossal error.' He said we need to do more to train Iraqis, but he also said we shouldn't be spending so much money over there. He said he wants to hold a summit meeting, so he can invite other countries to join what he calls 'the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.' He said terrorists are pouring across the Iraqi border, but also said that fighting those terrorists is a diversion from the war on terror. You hear all that and you can understand why somebody would make a face."

Before an adoring crowd, with a few days' reaction time and the help of a good speechwriter, Bush proved to be an electrifyingly clever debater. But, just when he was scoring his best points in Wilkes-Barre, he started making things up. During the Coral Gables debate, Kerry had been asked about his attitude toward preemptive war--the main ingredient of the "Bush doctrine," which also advocates unilateralism. "No President, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America," Kerry said. "But if and when you do it you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

By "global test," Kerry obviously meant not so much a formal procedure as an attitude--the spirit expressed by the Founding Fathers when they drafted the Declaration of Independence with "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Bush, however, seized on the phrase as an ideal target for ridicule and distortion. He called it "the Kerry doctrine" (in Wilkes-Barre, he even pretended that Kerry had called it that), and he made it out to mean a system of subjugating America's war-making authority to foreigners--the opposite of what Kerry had said. "Under this test, America would not be able to act quickly against threats, because we're sitting around waiting for our grade from other nations and other leaders," Bush said mockingly, and went on, "This mind-set will paralyze America in a dangerous world. . . . The Senator would have America bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of governments with agendas different from our own. This is my opponent's alliance-building strategy: brush off your best friends, fawn over your critics. And that is no way to gain the respect of the world."

Even with the fabrications and the misrepresentations, there was no denying that, with barely four weeks until Election Day, America was engaged, at last, in the sort of vigorous national debate that one might imagine to be the whole point of a Presidential-campaign season. Yet so much is left unsaid. In Iraq, there are only bad options--exit or escalate. And Kerry and Bush agreed in Coral Gables that Iraq is not even our greatest problem. Nuclear proliferation is, and particularly the possibility of loose nukes falling into the hands of terrorists. Of course, Bush credits the war in Iraq with sending a message to rogue proliferators: You could be next. By way of example, he cites Libya, whose leader, Muammar Qaddafi, he says, undertook to "disarm" his nuclear-weapons program shortly after marines toppled the statue of Saddam in Baghdad. (In fact, the equipment for Qaddafi's reactor was still in crates, unassembled, and he had been negotiating the trade-in for a long time, without any reference to Saddam.) In the meantime, Iran and North Korea, Iraq's original partners in Bush's "axis of evil," have heard the President's message differently, and have advanced their nuclear programs significantly since the American takeover of Baghdad; the North Korean state news agency has cited Iraq as an example of what can happen to countries that can't defend themselves with nukes.

For Bush, to say that the world is not as he describes it is to give solace to our enemies, undermine our forces on the field of battle, and endanger the lives of the citizenry. Even as the Duelfer report made it clear that Saddam Hussein had posed no threat to America, had no capacity to produce a threat, and had nothing to give to others to threaten us with, Bush stood on the stump in Wilkes-Barre scolding Kerry for saying the very same thing. "The problem with this approach is obvious," the President proclaimed. "If America waits until a threat is at our doorstep, it might be too late." Kerry is offering himself as the candidate of change--truth vs. unreality, a fresh start vs. more of the same. We need friends in this dangerous world, he says, and we need diplomacy to try and disarm and contain our enemies lest it should be our burden, otherwise, to destroy them. What Kerry doesn't say--and cannot say--is that when it comes to real threats, like North Korea and Iran, Bush's fixation with Iraq may already have made it too late for any American President to find a peaceful solution.