Agence France Presse March 02, 2004
Kerry toughens line on pre-emptive military action
BY PETER MACKLER
While US Democrats score President George W. Bush over his openness to unilateral military action, their likely standard bearer John Kerry appears to be talking tougher on defense himself.
The Massachusetts senator, who hopes to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination in "Super Tuesday's" slate of state votes, calls Bush "reckless" and preaches a foreign policy crafted around alliances and coalitions.
But as he nears a probable showdown with Bush in November, Kerry has been taking a more-muscular tack on security issues amid Republican charges he has been soft on defense in the Senate.
"Allies give us more hands in the struggle, but no president would ever let them tie our hands and prevent us from doing what must be done," he said Friday in what aides billed as a major address in California.
"As President, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake," Kerry said. "But I will not push away those who can and should share the burden."
The remarks sounded strikingly similar to Bush's State of the Union address in January when the president insisted he would "never seek a permission slip" to invade a country like Iraq if US security was at stake.
But their tone was a far cry from earlier pronouncements by Kerry, a Vietnam War hero turned anti-war protester and long-time stalwart of the Democratic party's liberal, or leftist, wing.
"No matter how much power we have, we cannot prevail singlehandedly," he said of the US war on terrorism in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on December 3.
Two weeks later, campaigning in the midwestern state of Iowa, he was more blunt: "We must change a course of unilateralism and pre-emptive war that is radically wrong for America."
Rand Beers, Kerry's top foreign policy aide, insisted the candidate had not shifted his position in recent weeks and was merely saying: "I disagree with pre-emption as a doctrine. I don't rule it out as an option."
"No politician is prepared to say categorically that he wouldn't be prepared to use force as a last resort if the situation warranted," Beers, a former top counter-terrorism official in the Bush adminsitration, told AFP.
For all his war medals, Kerry is facing a relentless Republican campaign to label him an irresolute dove who voted in the Senate to scrap various weapons systems and hold down intelligence spending.
He also stumbled early in the campaign over Iraq, having to explain why he first voted to authorize military action, then opposed Bush's prosecution of the war and finally voted against funds for reconstruction.
John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org think tank, said it would be natural for Kerry to shift emphasis as he moved from the Democratic race to a battle with Bush that could hinge on undecided voters.
But he still saw a qualitative differeence between the two on the question of pre-emptive strikes. "Bush has changed what has been a tactical option into a strategic preference," Pike said.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Kerry was clearly more inclined to multilateralism and less committed to pre-emption as a guiding doctrine than Bush.
But O'Hanlon said Kerry was likely calibrating his position to meet Bush's challenges on the security issue. "They are substantially far apart but not astronomically far apart," he said.
Still, the question of pre-emptive military strikes is not the only area where Kerry has changed tone.
In December, he said he would "be prepared early on to explore areas of mutual interest with Iran, just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam a decade ago."
But by last month Beers was clarifying Kerry's approach to a country that Washington suspects is building nuclear weapons and Bush has included in his famous "axis of evil."
"John Kerry is not saying he is looking for better relations with Iran. He is looking for a dialogue with Iran," Beers told a foreign policy symposium at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
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