Photo by Paul Shoul

Even if war in Iraq were to end today, President George W. Bush would have delivered a huge issue to US Senator John F. Kerry, who is a leading Democratic presidential candidate for 2004: the Bush administration's failure to place enough soldiers in Iraq.

Just two weeks into the war, it's almost universally recognized that US-led forces went into Iraq understaffed. Not only did Saddam Hussein's regime fail to crumble the moment the Third Infantry Division crossed the Kuwaiti border, but the much-vaunted "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign failed to prompt Iraqi military officers to defect. Toward the end of last week, American troops found themselves down to one meal per day, beset by ambushes, and short of sleep. Supply lines are stretched thin.

The decision, reportedly made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to keep troop numbers as low as possible, has become the main topic of the war -- at least here at home. "More than a dozen officers interviewed, including a senior officer in Iraq, said Rumsfeld took significant risks by leaving key units in the United States and Germany at the start of the war," the Washington Post reported on March 30. In the April 7 issue of the New Yorker, a Pentagon senior planner told Seymour Hersh, "This is tragic," and went on to liken Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who engineered plans for the Vietnam War that he knew were deeply flawed. (McNamara later acknowledged these failings in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam [Times Books], but public reaction to his mea culpa can be summarized in one phrase: too little, too late.)

It's important to remember, though, that while Rumsfeld is taking the heat now, the man ultimately responsible for the prosecution of the war in Iraq
is President Bush. Bush is Rumsfeld's boss, and if he had wanted to, he could have paid greater heed to Secretary of State Colin Powell's views on how -- or even whether -- to fight a war with Iraq. Bush also bears responsibility for the freakish cult of loyalty that rules the White House, where it is verboten for underlings to go over their bosses' heads to pass on information. In other words, in another White House, it might have been possible for members of the uniformed Pentagon brass to get their opinions to the president; or, if truly concerned, they could have leaked those apprehensions to the press. But in the world of Bush and his chief political strategist, Karl Rove, even internal dissent is discouraged.

After all, it was Bush who seemed so impatient to go to war that, during a January exchange with White House reporters, he flippantly likened the UN weapons-inspection process to a "bad movie" he wasn't "interested in watching." And during his prime-time March 6 national press conference on the situation in Iraq, the president dodged any discussion of the probable costs of war -- in either lives or dollars. He did acknowledge that he had "thought long and hard about the use of force," but did not warn the public of any dangers ahead. Bush said that he had "calculated the cost of inaction versus the cost of action," but he didn't elaborate.

None of this is to say the war won't still be won, and even won relatively quickly -- we are, after all, only two weeks into it. But, as everybody now knows, this is not the war the Bush administration expected. And eventually, when the dust clears, somebody is going to have to pay. Rumsfeld will likely be gone relatively soon after the war ends, if not before. The Wall Street Journal editorial page already weighed in with a pro-Rumsfeld piece on Tuesday titled RUMSFELD'S SECOND FRONT -- a blatantly desperate attempt to save the increasingly unpopular defense secretary's job. But more important, come 2004, the public may be persuaded to replace the man singularly responsible for the difficult position we're now in: George W. Bush.

Kerry, a Navy veteran who earned a Silver Star for his service in Vietnam, is probably best situated among the current crop of Democratic presidential contenders to take on Bush. He's the only one to have served in Vietnam. After he left the Navy, and as the US's flawed policy in Vietnam became clearer and clearer, Kerry took a leadership role in criticizing the war, famously asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" During that testimony, he also directly challenged the architects of Vietnam: "We're here to ask where are McNamara, [presidential adviser Walt] Rostow, [former national-security adviser McGeorge] Bundy, [former deputy secretary of defense Roswell] Gilpatrick, and so many others? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country."

Bush's war record, by contrast, is no profile in courage. He evaded service in Vietnam by joining up with the Texas Air National Guard. Later, as reported by the Boston Globe in October 2000, he was assigned to train in Alabama, but never showed up. And, while Bush didn't expose himself to the draft or volunteer to fight in Vietnam, neither did he speak out against it -- like Kerry did. Preoccupied with the high jinks of his fraternity, DKE, and his secret society at Yale, Skull and Bones, Bush didn't speak about much of anything. He "rarely talked of the nuances of the war, the stances his father and grandfather were taking, the military strategies, the roiling student protests, and the way it was all rattling the highest levels of government around the world," writes Bill Minutaglio in his 1999 biography of Bush, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (Times Books).

IT'S BECOME something of a Beltway pastime to harass Kerry for his fence-straddling on Iraq. Peter Beinart of the New Republic wrote in the magazine's February 10 issue that Kerry's attempt to reinvent himself in a straight-talking John McCain mode was "doomed to fail if Kerry keeps speaking so dishonestly about Iraq." Criticism from rival Democratic presidential hopeful former Vermont governor Howard Dean, delivered last week in Iowa, is more typical: "To this day, I don't know what John Kerry's position is. . . . If you agree with the war, then say so. If you don't agree with the war, then say so, but don't try to wobble around in between."

Yet this is all a bit disingenuous. Kerry's thoughtful, nuanced approach to dealing with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein -- which is based on principle, not polling -- has been fairly consistent over the long months of Bush's drum-beating build-up to war. It can be summed up in four simple points: 1) Hussein is evil and dangerous; 2) Hussein should be taken on via a multilateral coalition or under the auspices of the United Nations; 3) such a war should not be conducted without careful diplomacy aimed at keeping the coalition together; and 4) public support for such a war, both domestically and internationally, is essential. The only thing he and Bush apparently agree on is that Hussein is evil and must be disarmed.

"It may well be that the United States will go to war with Iraq," Kerry wrote in a September 6, 2002, New York Times op-ed summarizing his views on Iraq. "But if so, it should be because we have to -- not because we want to." He has reiterated that line many times during public discussion of the war. Indeed, when he has been attacked from the left for his stance on Iraq, Kerry has repeatedly stated that he is no pacifist. He believes there is a time and place for war, although he believes it ought to be entered into carefully and that combat troops must never be let down, as they were in Vietnam. And when attacked from the right, Kerry has pointed out that a nation at war needs the support of both the American public and the international community. All that said, though, some of the criticism leveled at Kerry may be rooted in how his thoughtful rhetoric is framed: it's often long-winded, more suited to his role as a legislator than to a presidential candidate who must deliver sharp sound bites in response to complicated questions. (Indeed, the Globe's Scot Lehigh faulted Kerry last December for taking 350 words to explain his Iraq position to Tim Russert on Meet the Press.)

In this context, it's interesting to consider how Kerry, were he president, might have prosecuted the war on Iraq -- assuming he would have even agreed to such an enterprise, with Osama bin Laden still on the loose and Afghanistan still in shambles. It's also interesting to contemplate how he might critique Bush's performance as commander in chief once the presidential campaign heats up. Kerry's résumé as a Naval officer, an anti-war protester, and a senator provides some clues. His ideas about modern warfare, foreign policy, and national defense are more clearly articulated in his 1997 book The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security (Simon & Schuster), in which he wrote: "We cannot fight alone; we need to create a new international alliance to meet [threats], like the alliances that defeated fascism, communism, and Saddam Hussein." At the very least, then, we know this much: Kerry clearly sides with the Pentagon brass, who are now speaking out about Bush's war plan.

Over the past week, the fault line between the Pentagon brass and the civilian architects of the war (Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, and, by natural and obvious extension, President Bush) has cracked open. For the most part, military higher-ups at the Pentagon adhere to the Powell Doctrine, which holds that, in war, America must apply "overwhelming force" against its enemies. Bush, by contrast, has signed on with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Rice, who subscribe to the "transformative war" theory that wars can be fought with much less force today because of the lethal combination of special-operations forces, refined technology, and precision bombing. There's little doubt that the Pentagon was opposed to the war in Iraq as it's currently configured (a pre-emptive strike being fought, as an anonymous field colonel told the New York Times on March 31, "on the cheap"). It's hard to imagine that Kerry would have agreed to anything other than a Powell-esque military build-up to the current war. The Powell Doctrine, for instance, prompted the US to send 500,000 troops to the Middle East during 1991 Gulf War; compare that with the 300,000 troops initially deployed for last month's invasion, which is clearly a much more complicated enterprise than was the first go-around with Saddam.

KERRY HAS ALREADY taken aim at Bush's handling of the war against terror, and it provides a glimpse of what he might do in a presidential campaign match-up focused on the prosecution of the war in Iraq. The Massachusetts senator was the first prominent Democrat to criticize Bush for the military's handling of the war in Afghanistan. Speaking to Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, in June 2002, Kerry came across as incredulous -- even furious -- that Bush had committed to the use of some military force against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, but not enough. That situation permitted bin Laden to get away. At issue was whether Bush's plan to use a largely Afghan force, assisted by US special-operations forces, could be expected to encircle Al Qaeda and eliminate bin Laden.

"Al Qaeda, a thousand strong, was gathered in one single mountain area, Tora Bora, and we turned to Afghans, who a week earlier had been fighting for the other side, and said, `Hey, you guys go up there in the mountains and go after the world's number-one terrorist and criminal who just killed 3000-plus Americans,' " Kerry fumed. "I think that was an enormous mistake. I think the Tora Bora operation was a failed military operation. . . . And the fact is that the prime target, Al Qaeda, has dispersed and in many ways is more dangerous than it was when it was in the mountains of Tora Bora."

Kerry's critique of US military operations in Afghanistan, which infuriated the Bush administration, were informed, Kerry sources say, by contacts he has made over the years as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, a post he relinquished when the Republicans retook the Senate in January. In the months after the battle of Tora Bora, Kerry began to hear from Pentagon and Delta Forces sources that the operation had been an avoidable disaster. Over a period of months, Kerry talked to numerous special-operations officials and experts to verify what he was being told.

We should expect a similar critique of the war in Iraq in the coming months, and certainly during the presidential campaign. As the war wears on, Bush's failings as a communicator will be magnified. Eventually -- with any luck -- the conflict will move from explicit combat to a slow winding down in which the US will have to navigate a morass of political, military, and diplomatic tangles. In that context, the more long-winded, yet thoughtful John Kerry may seem infinitely more appealing than the succinct but Manichean Bush. The question is whether Kerry can channel his rhetorical gymnastics and careful forethought into a crisp and decisive persona. It's a question upon which the results of the next presidential election could hinge.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.comIssue Date: April 4 - 10, 2003