Kerry’s missing war plan

Iraq-war-basher John Kerry is coming under fire for refusing to say how he would have run the battle differently from President Bush.

The Massachusetts liberal’s almost daily political attacks accuse Mr. Bush of a failed, inept, arrogant policy that has cost hundreds of U.S. soldiers’ lives. Last week, he called the postwar situation “one of the greatest failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time I’ve been in public life.”

Mr. Kerry’s attacks are aimed at energizing his party’s large antiwar bloc and its huge base of donors who gave antiwar candidate Howard Dean more than $40 million last year. But Mr. Kerry’s strange reluctance to spell out how he would defeat the al Qaeda-backed terrorists throughout Iraq is fueling criticism from the foreign policy community, even among his own supporters.

Top national security experts here say Mr. Kerry is all attacks, no solutions.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what his prescriptions in Iraq would be,” says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a veteran State Department and National Security Council adviser and now a national security scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Some people may, but I don’t.”

“He may become president and inherit this war. But what he’s doing is attacking and criticizing and maybe exploiting whatever the polls may be showing, and playing on the emotions of families who have sons and daughters over there,” Mr. Sonnenfeldt said.

But Mr. Kerry, he said, will eventually have to “get serious if he is going to be taken seriously” about dealing with the issue. “But he hasn’t done that.”

Even some of Mr. Kerry’s backers are becoming uneasy about the relentlessly negative attacks on the administration’s war policies, and want him to change his tone and tactics.

“He has said there is no easy way out and has resisted the temptation to say cut-and-run,” says defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon, a staunch Kerry supporter and a senior foreign policy fellow at Brookings. “But I do agree that Kerry could be a little more constructive and a little less negative in his tone.

“I would like to see Kerry talk about how we can win the war in Iraq in a broader way, how we can win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. I’d like him to be more visionary.”

Mr. Kerry not only faces foreign policy criticism in Washington, but also from the national news media, which has begun to criticize the shallowness of his attacks — a trend that now worries Mr. Kerry’s top command.

“It was clear this week [Mr. Kerry] had no alternative plan for pacifying Iraq, beyond a vague notion that other nations should help out,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

That kind of criticism from the people who cover Mr. Kerry’s campaign daily can hurt him. For the campaign press corps to turn on him so early in the election cycle is foreboding for a candidate who, until recently, has largely been given a free ride by the Washington media.

Kerry campaign strategists are divided on what his strategy should be in Iraq at a time when the situation there appears to be going badly for the president. Some say he doesn’t need to be more specific about what he would do when things are going badly there. “Don’t interfere when your opponent is in trouble,” is the way one Democratic adviser put it.

Other Kerry advisers say he has to do more than just attack Mr. Bush’s policies, because that makes him look like a radical antiwar critic who does not have a clear, comprehensive plan to defeat the insurgents and ultimately bring peace and democracy to Iraq.

Regardless of the direction Mr. Kerry chooses, his attacks thus far don’t appear to be hurting Mr. Bush on the critical issue of the war on terrorism.

A National Annenberg Election Survey reported Friday that “Americans consider Bush steadier, a stronger leader, more likeable and less likely to bow to political pressure than Kerry.”

Most important, Annenberg found Mr. Bush’s leadership attribute was his “biggest edge in the 18 battleground states,” where, in a ten-point scale, the president was rated at 6.02 and Kerry at 4.76.

If he has any hope of changing these numbers, Mr. Kerry will have to say how he would win the war in Iraq and risk alienating the antiwar Dean voters who rallied to his candidacy in the primaries.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.