As The Election Nears, The Question Remains Who Will Make Us Safer?

By Romesh Ratnesar

To appreciate how George W. Bush and John Kerry each look at the world, it helps to start with Sept. 11, 2001. Minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon that morning, President Bush, who had been reading to schoolchildren in Sarasota, Fla., phoned Vice President Dick Cheney from his cabin in Air Force One. "We're at war," he said. As the President's plane was taking off over Florida, Kerry strode down the steps of the Capitol in Washington, having received orders to evacuate. In an interview with the New York Times, Kerry recalled scanning the skies for incoming aircraft as he left the building. He turned to someone near him. "This is war," Kerry remembers saying. "This is an act of war."

It says something about the similarities between Bush and Kerry that both seemed to recognize--far sooner than most--that the 9/11 attacks had thrust the U.S. into a struggle of historic magnitude. But as this presidential campaign careers toward a photo finish, the result has come to hinge on the ways the two men have diverged since that fateful day. For Bush, the attacks were the catalyst for war not just against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network but also against any state that harbored, sponsored or supported terrorists. Even more ambitiously, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told TIME, Bush soon concluded that a "permanent peace is only going to come when you've dealt with the conditions that produced terrorists, and that means a different kind of Middle East." That, in part, led to the most fateful presidential decision in a generation: the invasion of Iraq. Kerry has since galvanized his candidacy by condemning the war as a mistake and blasting Bush for "taking his eye off the terrorists."

When voters choose their President on Nov. 2, they will be the first in 30 years to do so under the shadow of war. So it's unsurprising that the clash between Bush and Kerry over Iraq, terrorism and national security has become a defining fault line. On the hustings last week, each candidate issued extraordinary indictments of his opponent's fitness to be Commander in Chief. "The President says he's a leader," Kerry told an audience in Waterloo, Iowa. "Well, Mr. President, look behind you. There's hardly anyone there." Less than 100 miles away, Bush questioned Kerry's steadfastness against the threat of terrorism: "You can't win a war when you don't believe you're fighting one." The sniping was more than rhetorical. In exchanges like those and during their three head-to-head debates, the candidates have revealed sharp differences in how they view the world. Bush sees Iraq as central to the campaign against al-Qaeda; Kerry calls Iraq a diversion from it. Kerry stresses the need to work within alliances; Bush has shown a propensity to act alone. The President speaks openly of using force to promote democracy in the Muslim world; Kerry's belief in power is tempered by a recognition of its limits. Kerry is cautious; Bush courts risk. "The only thing in common between these guys is Skull and Bones," says Kerry adviser Richard Holbrooke, referring to the secret society that Bush and Kerry belonged to at Yale.

But despite the obvious contrasts in style and temperament, it's less clear that the two men would pursue dramatically divergent foreign policies. "The nature of the world creates constraints," says Harvard political scientist and former Bill Clinton aide Joseph Nye. "The differences in philosophy may turn out to be somewhat less stark when put into practice." The most immediate challenge that will face either man as President--how to buttress a credibly elected Iraqi government in the face of a ruthless insurgency--won't bend to a quick fix. Both Kerry and Bush argue that a rapid turnover of combat duties to Iraqis would provide relief to U.S. troops, but that objective may take years to achieve. Though Kerry hopes to pull U.S. forces out by the end of his first term, the danger that Iraq could descend into terrorism-torn anarchy and sectarian strife means that the U.S. will maintain its current presence of 138,000 troops for the foreseeable future.

The dilemmas don't end there. With such a sizable force tied down in Iraq, whoever is President will have fewer military options for curtailing, for example, the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. He will confront a seething Muslim world unsettled by the war in Iraq and the plight of the Palestinians. And he may well see bin Laden--inspired extremists try to overthrow the government in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, procure weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or stage another attack on U.S. soil--or all of the above.

Which candidate is better equipped to deal with such threats? In attempting to draw a contrast with Kerry, Bush likes to say, "If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy." Yet both candidates have shifted course on many major foreign policy issues, ultimately arriving at positions that resemble each other's more than either man likes to admit. But if both have shown a capacity to alter their policies, both cling to disparate world views. The problem is that neither man's philosophy on its own is entirely satisfying in the wake of Sept. 11. Fashioning a strategy that can keep the country safe while advancing U.S. values over the next four years will require either man to reconsider some of his deepest convictions about how America should act in the world. The choice, in some respects, comes down to deciding which one would be more flexible in his beliefs.

DEFINING THE ENEMY

Few Presidents have sought to define themselves by their role as Commander in Chief as much as George W. Bush. Even before he assumed office, Bush declared his willingness to use the U.S.'s military supremacy to deter enemies. "Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation," he said in 1999. "They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment." Bush's faith in military force became the guiding tenet of his presidency after 9/11. "He determined on that day that you could not fight this war just on defense," Rice says. "It's an unfair fight when they have to be right once and you have to be right 100% of the time." Despite the strain on U.S. forces and the rising death toll in Iraq, Bush has refused to revise that basic premise. "We will fight the terrorists around the world so we do not have to face them here at home," he said in the first presidential debate.

Intelligence and counterterrorism experts say the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan, coupled with a more aggressive manhunt for al-Qaeda operatives around the world, damaged bin Laden's operation in the months after 9/11. Of the 30 high-value al-Qaeda targets identified by the CIA in 2001, nearly half have been killed or are in custody. Yet since their rumored flight from the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have eluded the 16,000 U.S. forces hunting them in Afghanistan, probably slipping into Pakistan. Only one high-value target has been captured in the past year. The International Institute of Strategic Studies estimates that as many as 90% of the 20,000 militants trained in al-Qaeda camps are still at large.

Western intelligence officials and leaders in the Muslim world say the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has, at the least, given bin Laden and his allies a potent recruiting tool. That forms the heart of Kerry's case against Bush. Kerry told an audience in Iowa last week that in Iraq, "the President's miscalculations have created a terrorist haven that wasn't there before."

Kerry's argument that Iraq is a diversion from the war against al-Qaeda reflects a view of global terrorism that he began to formulate a decade ago. Bush's advisers have argued that terrorist organizations cannot function effectively without the support of rogue states like Iraq. But in the Senate, Kerry investigated money-laundering and drug cartels, delving deep into the world of lawless, stateless groups that exploit technology to escape justice. In 1997 he wrote The New War, a book in which he argued for a global law-enforcement and intelligence-sharing apparatus that could shut down international criminal networks. Since 9/11, Kerry has used that framework to explain the threat posed by al-Qaeda, which he sees as a network of like-minded groups beyond the control or influence of any single state. Kerry adviser Jonathan Winer says Kerry's approach to fighting terrorism would focus on strengthening international efforts to crack down on terrorist financing and monitor "wiretaps, regulation of transborder issues, the Internet, telecommunications, all of this common mass infrastructure."

So would Kerry make a clean break from Bush's war on terrorism? It's doubtful. The Bush campaign has tried to cast Kerry's emphasis on policing and financial regulation as a relic of the pre-9/11 age, when the U.S. treated terrorism as a law-enforcement problem rather than a military threat. But Bush has pursued many of the same ideas. In 2002 Bush's national-security strategy argued that to defeat terrorism, "we must make use of every tool in our arsenal--military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing." Like Bush, Kerry "would also view countries that are terrorist havens as bearing responsibility and something we would have to deal with directly," says Rand Beers, Kerry's top national-security aide. Kerry has repeatedly signaled his intention to continue to employ the military to hunt down al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. "I have no doubt John would be willing to use military force against terrorists," says former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. "He's willing to be ruthless in the pursuit of those who say killing Americans is a good idea."

Just as Kerry would be likely to adopt the basic principles of Bush's military strategy against al-Qaeda, a re-elected Bush might have little choice but to embrace many of his opponent's prescriptions for Iraq. Bush and his advisers routinely dismiss Kerry's calls to internationalize the occupation, but the U.S.'s failure to pacify Iraq has forced the White House to seek help it rejected last April. It enlisted the U.N. to select an interim government and oversee January's national elections and secured NATO's participation in training Iraqi security forces.

Bush was openly derisive of international institutions for much of this term, but the crisis in Iraq has forced him to try to reach out. In June, when he called former Missouri Senator John Danforth to offer him the post of U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Danforth hesitated. "I told him, 'Mr. President, the book on you is that you're a unilateralist and the U.N. isn't important,'" Danforth says. "And his response to me was, 'No, that's not right. It's very important to use the U.N. to establish better relations with the rest of the world.'"

The question is whether anyone is listening. Whoever is elected President will be inaugurated amid howling skepticism about U.S. motives in the world. "It's significantly worse than at any time I can remember," says former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the independent 9/11 commission. "I talk to a lot of people from many countries, and the common refrain I hear is how low our standing is. That's going to be a major challenge to the next President." The failure to find WMD in Iraq dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of U.S. intelligence, compromising the U.S.'s ability to rally allies to confront Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs. Kerry's natural attachment to Europe--he spent part of his youth there and speaks fluent French, passable Italian and Spanish, and a little German--could help mend relations with European allies that have recoiled from the Administration's policies, such as France and Germany.

The U.S. still faces a plummeting image in the Muslim world that is unlikely to improve so long as U.S. forces are embroiled in combat in Iraq and Palestinian aspirations for statehood are unfulfilled. Here too the candidates' positions differ only in degree: Kerry says, if elected, he would appoint an envoy to the Middle East to restart the peace process, but like Bush, he backs Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's refusal to negotiate a permanent settlement while Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remains in power.

FAITH AND FACTS

The choice on Nov. 2 will be defined less by the policies the two candidates have set out than by whether they have proved their capacity to lead. Bush leads through a certainty in the rightness of his cause that is unshaken by the absence of WMD or by more than 1,000 combat deaths in Iraq. "He has a single-minded determination to protect the U.S. from being destroyed by terrorists," says Danforth. "And he believes that spreading freedom is an essential part of protecting America."

Bush's faith in democracy as a salve for extremism and violence can startle even his closest advisers. Rice says that during a meeting on Iraq with his top national-security aides last November, he demanded to know why the Administration was resisting Iraqis' clamor for elections. "'How did we get on the wrong side of this issue?'" Rice recalls Bush saying. "'How could it be that the United States of America is standing on the side against elections?' It was a very stark statement that kind of pulled everybody back." Bush's stump speech in the campaign's final days reminds voters of the conviction on which he has staked his presidency: "Freedom is on the march."

Kerry has never been comfortable with such soaring slogans. During his early years in the Senate, his service in Vietnam made him a reluctant interventionist. He voted against the first Gulf War, accusing the elder Bush of "impatience with sanctions and diplomacy" and warning that the country "is not yet ready for what it will witness and bear" if it goes to war. In the 1990s Kerry backed the use of force in the Balkans but criticized President Clinton as "arrogant" for referring to the U.S. as "the indispensable nation." Kerry's biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, says, "Kerry is not a Wilsonian. He does not believe we have a moral mission to remake the world in our image." Whereas Bush talks about the "transformational power of liberty," Kerry is a gradualist. He pledged last week to take measures to support "modernizers" within nondemocratic countries rather than wage "reckless campaigns to impose democracy by force from the outside."

Given the current strains on U.S. resources and manpower, Kerry's hardheaded realism seems sensible for the times. His advisers say he would insist on policies grounded in facts rather than ideological goals. In Kerry's view, Bush's belief in the inevitability of freedom's triumph has become a hazard, blinding him to the harsh reality of the country's predicament in Iraq. "This is the critical issue that goes back to his experiences in Vietnam," says Winer. "Respect for the facts is critical. Kerry's approach is fact based. President Bush's is faith based."

But in times of crisis, Americans gravitate toward leaders whose convictions point toward a grand project that others don't yet perceive. After 9/11 Bush benefited from the public's willingness to suspend its skepticism and go along with his audacious vision for transforming the Middle East. Some of that trust, however, was squandered with the invasion of Iraq--and so the challenger finds the presidency within his grasp. Kerry may yet win as a result of the collapse of Bush's vision. But if he does, the scale of the challenges facing the new Commander in Chief will demand that he find one of his own. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington