Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable

September 7, 2004
THE CANDIDATES
Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and DAVID E. SANGER

CLEVELAND, Sept. 6 - Senator John Kerry and President Bush clashed repeatedly over Iraq on Monday, with Mr. Kerry branding it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and saying he wanted all American troops home within four years, while Mr. Bush defended the war as "right for America then and it's right for America now."

Their conventions behind them, the candidates spent Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign season, doing what they have done for months: trading roundhouse punches over Iraq, job losses and health care.

Mr. Kerry, who campaigned before blue-collar workers in suburban Pittsburgh and coal miners in West Virginia and in an African-American neighborhood in Cleveland, unveiled a new attack on Mr. Bush, saying voters needed to decide between the president's "wrong choices and wrong direction for America" and his own promises to create jobs, strengthen the economy and expand access to health care.

"The W stands for wrong,'' Mr. Kerry said in a riff on the president's middle initial at a labor picnic in Racine, W.Va.

But it was Mr. Kerry's responses to two questions about Iraq that set off a flurry of attacks by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Asked his timetable for pulling troops out of Iraq, Mr. Kerry told a few hundred people in Canonsburg, Pa.: "My goal would be to get them home in my first term. And I believe that can be done." He said he would make it clear that "we do not have long-term designs to maintain bases and troops in Iraq."

Mr. Kerry has said he could replace most, but not all, American troops with foreign forces within four years by offering new inducements to other countries.

"When they talk about a coalition - that's the phoniest thing I ever heard," Mr. Kerry said of the current array of foreign soldiers deployed in Iraq. "You've got 500 troops here, 500 troops there, and it's American troops that are 90 percent of the combat casualties, and it's American taxpayers that are paying 90 percent of the cost of the war.

"It's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

Mr. Bush has said repeatedly that it would be unwise to set a deadline for beginning or finishing a pullout of troops in Iraq. Terrorist groups, he argues, would use the date to their strategic advantage. And he often says that American troops will come home "as soon as the job is done'' without specifying the criteria for the completion of the mission.

In Poplar Bluff, Mo., Mr. Bush told supporters that Mr. Kerry couldn't make up his mind.

"After saying he would have voted for the war, even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisers and yet another new position,'' Mr. Bush said to laughter and to cries of, "Flip-flop. Flip-flop.''

"Suddenly he's against it again," Mr. Bush said. "No matter how many times Senator Kerry changes his mind, it was right for America then and it's right for America now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.''

Mr. Cheney, campaigning in Clear Lake, Iowa, criticized Mr. Kerry for "demeaning our allies."

"When it comes to diplomacy, it looks like John Kerry should stick to windsurfing," he said.

The exchange between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry spotlighted how the two campaigns had honed their message on Iraq - and how they emphasize different aspects of the issue.

Mr. Bush has tried to convince crowds that he and Mr. Kerry agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and that Mr. Kerry's position has simply changed with the winds and the casualty numbers.

Mr. Kerry argues that the president has deliberately conflated two very different issues: whether it was right to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for his defiance of the United Nations, and whether Mr. Bush, once given that authority by the Congress, used it properly.

The essence of Mr. Kerry's argument - one he has had a difficult time making - is that Mr. Bush obtained the authority to go to war on false intelligence, and then prosecuted the war in a way that alienated allies and prolonged the insurgency.

At day's end on Monday, Mr. Kerry told thousands at a rally that Mr. Bush "wishes I have the same position he does, but as we've learned from this president, just wishing something, and saying something, doesn't make it so."

"When it comes to Iraq, I would not have done just one thing differently, I would have done everything differently from this president," he added.

Now, however, Mr. Kerry is going further, talking of the economic cost of the war and how that money could have been better spent.

"George Bush's wrongheaded, go-it-alone Iraq policy has cost you - cost you - already, over $200 billion," Mr. Kerry said in Cleveland. "That's $200 billion we're not investing in Cleveland. That's $200 billion we're not investing in our schools and in No Child Left Behind, that's $200 billion we're not investing in health care for all Americans and prescription drugs that are affordable."

It was a measure of how Iraq has overshadowed so many other issues in the campaign that it even dominated on Labor Day, the moment Mr. Bush has often used to focus attention on job creation, one of the points of vulnerability of his campaign.

That economic record, of course, is Mr. Kerry's main target, as he made clear in trying out a new speech.

"The choice in this race is very simple," Mr. Kerry said. "It's whether you want to continue to move in the wrong direction, or whether you want to turn it around and move the United States of America in the right direction and put people back to work."

"Do you want four more years of lost jobs?" he asked, as his crowd shouted, "No!"

"Do you want four more years of shipping jobs overseas and replacing them with jobs that pay you less than the jobs you have today?"

Mr. Kerry said Mr. Bush had the worst record on job creation "since Herbert Hoover." At the front-porch session in a middle-class neighborhood in Canonsburg on Monday morning, Mr. Kerry fended off pro-Bush hecklers while talking of people earning less money and paying more for health care. Lori Sheldon, 45, stirred in her seat. "You told our story," she said to him.

Her husband, Ms. Sheldon said, works on a ground crew for US Airways in Pittsburgh and fears he may be laid off in the fall. "You see those two young ladies over there? Those are my daughters," she said, beginning to sob. "I'm tired of saying no. We say no all the time."

Mr. Kerry said, "What we need is a president making choices not to reward Halliburton and a bunch of big companies, but reward the American people."

"I want you to be able to say yes to your kids," he said.

Mr. Bush's appearance in Poplar Bluff was his only one of the day. The southeastern Missouri town was so eager to hear him that more than 10,000 people, or nearly two-thirds of the population, signed a petition urging him to visit. When he agreed, the town organized one of the largest rallies of his campaign: more than 23,000 went through metal detectors, ignoring a light evening rain.

The president made a dramatic entrance, with Marine One, his helicopter, landing in a field. Though it was Labor Day, Mr. Bush only briefly touched on job creation. Picking his time frame carefully, Mr. Bush noted that "last Friday, we showed we added 144,000 new jobs in August,'' saying that was "1.7 million since August of '03.''

"The national unemployment rate has fallen to 5.4 percent,'' he said. "That is lower than the average rate of the 1970's, the 1980's and the 1990's.''

He spoke about tax simplification and farm exports with the passion of a man acutely aware that he won Missouri in 2000 by only a bit more than three percentage points and that re-election would be enormously difficult without winning it again.

David M. Halbfinger reported from Cleveland for this article and David E. Sanger from Poplar Bluff, Mo.

Link to Kerry's Speech: http://www.iht.com/articles/537651.html

Phoney? Phoney? Boy, that Kerry is one smooth diplomat, huh? No wonder he has all of Europe, so he says, waiting to eat out of his hand. Nothing like insulting the people and countries that are fighting this war on terror shoulder-to-shoulder with us.

Yeah. He's the perfect choice for Commander-in-Chief.