Kerry Denounces 'Inept' Bush Foreign Policy

Kerry Denounces 'Inept' Bush Foreign Policy

New York Times
December 4, 2003
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Senator John Kerry attacked President Bush yesterday for an ''arrogant, inept, reckless'' foreign policy and laid out a detailed plan for prosecuting the war on terrorism far differently while ''building bridges to the Islamic world.''

Mr. Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a presidential candidate, called for a harder line toward Saudi Arabia and a softer approach to Iran.

In a sharp critique of the president's policies regarding terrorism, Mr. Kerry said that the administration was ''intoxicated'' with America's surpassing military power but that its ''triumphalism'' had only made the nation ''less safe today than we were three years ago.''

''This is the consequence of a policy that regards legitimacy as largely a product of force, and victory as primarily a triumph of arms,'' he said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

''Triumphalism may make the armchair warriors in the seats of power feel good, but it does not serve America or the world's interests.''

Mr. Kerry, who voted last year in the Senate to authorize force in Iraq but has criticized Mr. Bush's failure to build an international coalition, has been focusing his campaign on his Senate foreign policy experience.

Setting out his own approach to the Middle East, Mr. Kerry said yesterday he would find common ground with Iran by fighting the flow of drugs from Afghanistan and by exchanging anti-Iranian terrorists operating out of Iraq for members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban now in Iran.

He also said he would demand that Saudi Arabia crack down on anti-Semitic and anti-American hate speech and stop supporting Hamas. ''The Saudis cannot pick and choose among terrorist groups,'' he said.

In his critique of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry said that the president's policy ''diminishes Islamic moderates and fuels the fire of jihadists,'' helping create more terrorists.

''Instead of demeaning diplomacy, I will restore diplomacy as a tool of the strong,'' Mr. Kerry said.

On Iraq, Mr. Kerry accused the administration of considering a ''cut and run strategy'' in which it would speed up the timetable for withdrawing troops as a ploy to win votes in November 2004, but at the risk of ''the hijacking of Iraq by terrorist groups and former Baathists.''

An adviser to Mr. Kerry, Rand Beers, said before the speech that thousands more coalition troops were needed to stabilize Iraq and that Mr. Kerry would not rule out sending Americans as part of that mix.

Mr. Kerry said that L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority there, should be replaced by a United Nations special representative.

He also said that if elected president he would name a special envoy to the Middle East peace process, and offered a few possible appointees, including the former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and even President Bush's father, as well as the elder Mr. Bush's secretary of state, James A. Baker III.

On Afghanistan, he said he would double American anti-narcotics aid to the Karzai government to tackle the exploding Afghan opium crop -- an area where he said the United States and Iran had a mutual interest, but which the Bush administration had ignored.

Another area, he said, is in cracking down on terrorists -- the United States in pursuing members of Al Qaeda in Iran, and Iran in pursuing members of the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Mujahedeen, an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group.

Mr. Kerry said he would start a ''name and shame'' campaign against those who finance terrorism and would not shrink from shutting foreign governments out of the United States financial system if they did not comply -- a weapon he said had rarely been used.

One country that could fall into that category, he suggested, is Saudi Arabia, for exporting hate speech across the world. Though Saudi officials have promised changes, Mr. Kerry said: ''We need to see the new textbooks. We need to hear what the government-financed clerics are preaching.''

Acknowledging that America's oil dependency on Saudi Arabia was ''for the moment inescapable,'' Mr. Kerry vowed to wean America from its reliance on Arab oil imports.

He proposed ideas for reaching out to Muslim nations, in part by charging American diplomats with appealing to ''populations, not just to governments,'' and naming a presidential envoy to the Islamic world.

''We must speak,'' he said, ''and we must listen.''