DAMAGE CONTROL.(Sen. John Kerry's position on the Iraq war)

During the loneliest days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, last December, when he was trailing Al Sharpton in some polls and reporters covering the race were placing bets that he'd drop out before the first voters were heard from in the Iowa caucuses, Senator John Kerry came to New York to address the Council on Foreign Relations. It was hard, then, to find anyone outside his immediate family who would speak with unaverted eyes of the likelihood of a Kerry comeback. Even among the Democrats in his audience, which was packed with soberly tailored politicians, diplomats, military officers, and captains of finance, industry, philanthropy, and think tanks, there was a sense of near-certitude--for some delightful, for others grim--that Howard Dean was unstoppable. As a governor, Dean had been spared having to take sides when the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq was passed in both houses of Congress, in October of 2002, and he'd made himself a scourge to his rivals in the primary race who voted for it. He called them "Bush Lite." Kerry's deeply recessed eyes, small as an elephant's, appeared more than usually narrowed in those days, and his smile, too, had tightened into the sort of skeptical wince that a cartoon dad displays to signal his endurance of adolescent noise. But he didn't waste a word on Dean when he addressed the council.

Kerry had stayed up late for several nights, crafting his speech, and it was as succinct and cogent a summation of his case against the President as he has offered to date. "Simply put," Kerry declared, "the Bush Administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history":

In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the world rallied to the common cause of fighting terrorism. But President Bush has squandered that historic moment. . . . He rushed into battle--and he went almost alone. . . . I believed a year ago and I believe now that we had to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and that we needed to lead in that effort. But this Administration did it in the worst possible way: without the United Nations, without our allies, without a plan to win the peace. So we are left asking: How is it possible to liberate a country, depose a ruthless dictator who at least in the past had weapons of mass destruction, and convert a preordained success into a diplomatic fiasco? How is it possible to do what the Bush Administration has done in Iraq: win a great military victory yet make America weaker?

Kerry called on the Administration to "swallow its pride" and do what it should have done in the first place: bring in the U.N. and the "international community" to help America succeed instead of inviting failure alone.

Kerry's position has not changed, and, seven months later, his critique of Bush is shared by a growing majority of voters. But passionate antipathy to Bush has not translated into a corresponding enthusiasm for Kerry. Even after his astonishing sweep of the primaries, and the widely celebrated selection of John Edwards as his running mate, Kerry perplexes much of the electorate. Although he has led Bush in the polls during the runup to the Democratic Convention, many voters still complain that they do not know what he stands for. Kerry can be frustratingly vague and inarticulate, but then Presidential challengers--who have no power to take action--have always thought it wise not to box themselves into specific foreign-policy commitments. In a race that is sure to be uncommonly harsh and uncommonly dirty, Kerry has sought to limit his size as a target. His ever-sharpening attacks on an ever more vulnerable President aside, he avoids taking firm positions on the immediate tactical questions of Iraq policy (whether the U.S. should send more troops, how to deal with the insurgents, how much de-Baathification is too little or too much), preferring to talk about strategy in broad terms that create the maximum contrast between his position and that of the President. Indeed, when it comes to Iraq, Kerry has been largely content so far to allow the Presidential race to play out as a one-man scramble, Bush vs. Bush.

Throughout the spring and early summer--with exposes of Bush's rush to war stacking the best-seller lists, while the September 11th commission hearings filled television screens, alongside reports of rampant insurrection in Iraq and the irreparable disgrace of Americans torturing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison--Kerry seemed to be measuring out his comments on the war with deliberate reserve. "A few months ago," Richard Holbrooke said to me, "I couldn't go down the street in New York or Washington without people stopping me and asking, 'Why isn't he speaking out more clearly on Iraq?' " But Holbrooke, who is considered a leading contender for the post of Secretary of State in a Kerry Administration, thought that Kerry had just the right strategy. "We are in the throes of the greatest crisis since Vietnam and maybe even worse. Kerry has to allow events to unfold. But he should not be expected to lay out a plan significantly more detailed than he has, because it's not necessary at this point. Everyone knows he would do it differently." Sandy Berger, who was Bill Clinton's national-security adviser and who is now advising Kerry, agreed, and he went further. "There are no silver bullets on Iraq," he said. "So if people are waiting for John Kerry to say, 'The answer is Rosebud,' there is no Rosebud."

Americans are unaccustomed to questions of foreign policy, grand strategy, and war figuring decisively in a Presidential contest. In the nearly thirty years since our evacuation from Vietnam, such matters have been the province of specialists, addressed on the campaign trail with a minimum of partisan passion, either in broad abstractions (Reagan's "evil empire," Bush's "new world order," Clinton's "assertive multilateralism") or technocratically (arms control, U.N. resolutions, weapons systems, trade agreements). The shock of the September 11th attacks in 2001 forced these issues to the center of public consciousness and, simultaneously, muted political debate as the leaders of both parties allowed the President and his most favored ministers--Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft--an extraordinarily free hand to promulgate and implement his war policy abroad and at home. It took Dean's brief and sensational antiwar candidacy to bring this go-along-and-get-along period to an end. Since then, the unravelling of Bush's case for attacking Saddam Hussein, and his retreat from his original ambitions for postwar Iraq, have left him increasingly on the defensive.