Vice President Dick Cheney subsequently observed that if Kerry was elected, "we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set . . . that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."
Kerry's response was that "it's a different kind of war. You have to understand that this is not 'The Sands of Iwo Jima,"' a reference to the World War II set-piece combat between U.S. Marines and Japanese soldiers.
Three years after that presidential campaign, the argument goes on. In a Washington Post article, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has charged that Bush, in using the phrase the "war on terror," has "created a culture of fear in America." He argues that it "has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us."
Brzezinski calls the phrase "a classic self-inflicted wound" that "intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demogogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue." Bush's war of choice, he writes, could never have gained congressional support "without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."
Carter's old adviser even suggests that by also comparing this war with the fight against Nazism and Soviet communism, "the administration could be preparing the case for war with Iran."
The "war on terror" phrase goes back to Bush himself. After a short period of shocked confusion after 9/11, he declared its existence and proclaimed himself "a war president" with all the assumed extended powers constitutionally assigned as commander in chief (specifically of the armed forces, not of the nation).
Playing with words on serious matters is not new. During the Korean War, in which this country, without a declaration of war, responded to a United Nations call for help to South Korea, President Harry Truman called it a "police action." It could be argued that our attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan was the same, until Bush's pivoting diversion to Iraq ended up as a civil war with U.S. forces in the middle.
Even now, the president continues to play the fear card, repeating last month in defending his troop "surge" in Iraq that "if we fail there, the enemy will follow us here." Brzezinski has labeled the claim absurd, and U.S. intelligence experts have said al-Qaida in Iraq has its hands full there.
In any event, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently indicated that a fewer foreigners are moving into Iraq to join the al-Qaida effort. And most of the sectarian insurgent groups there clearly want the American forces to leave Iraq and would have no reason to "follow us" home, occupied as they then would be continuing their civil war.
Congressional critics now pressing for American withdrawal have signed onto the bipartisan Iraqi Study Group plan, to have U.S. troops redeploy outside Iraq to train and assist Iraqi police and army forces dealing with the civil-war combatants.
That begins to sound very much like "police action," or as Kerry put it in that 2004 debate, a "law-enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world." He also said at one point that "we have to get back to the place we were, wherein terrorists were not the focus of our lives," and that it's a mistake not to regard the terrorists as criminals and treat them accordingly.
Tom Malinowksi, a Human Rights Watch director, has noted that the new Army Counterinsurgency Manual drafted under General David Petraeus, now leading Bush's "surge" in Iraq, says to "establish legitimacy" military commanders need to move "from combat operations to law enforcement as quickly as feasible. When insurgents are seen as criminals, they lose public support."
Maybe Kerry's advice wasn't so off the mark after all.
Jules Witcover can be reached by e-mail at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.
