The great Iraq debate
Two men, two views. This week, finally, they get to go head to head
In practice, this comes down to a debate about America's traditional alliances and Bush's practice of assembling "coalitions of the willing." "This president recognizes that as different problems come forward, they will require different groups of countries to deal with them," says Richard Falkenrath, a former Bush aide now at the Brookings Institution. Kerry, meanwhile, says that relations with allies need urgent repair: "We are weaker when we fight almost alone."
In many ways, there is a strange reversal of historic roles. Kerry (the Democrat) is promoting himself as the realist, while Bush (the Republican), with his proselytizing talk of spreading democracy, comes across as more the idealist along the lines of Woodrow Wilson. Richard Holbrooke, a top Kerry adviser on foreign policy, faults Bush administration officials for articulating a "sloppy neo-Wilsonianism" in which "they talk about democracy, but none of their policies advance it--not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in Liberia." Yet Bush can, and does, point to accomplishments like an upcoming election in Afghanistan and plans for voting in Iraq.
True or false? Much of this will come down to whether Kerry's new assault on Bush's credibility can be successful. The two candidates will trade competing facts, but the truth will very likely be quite elusive for viewers. Take, for example, the spat that broke out last week over the number of Iraqi police and soldiers. Months ago, the Bush administration was boasting about more than 200,000 Iraqi security forces, while more recently, Bush has talked about nearly 100,000 soldiers. Kerry puts the number of deployable soldiers at 5,000 and says that no police officers are fully trained. As is often the case with statistics, it all depends on definition. The early training for Iraqi forces was so spotty that Washington was forced to start the count at zero a few months ago. The Pentagon says it has nearly 39,000 police who have completed a multiweek training course and who are on duty in a probationary status. Few, if any, though, have completed the mandatory half-year mentoring program.
That kind of complexity is almost certain to get lost in a 90-minute debate, but America will still be listening.
With Julian E. Barnes
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