Kerry Criticizes the Way Bush Went to War

Calling the Bush administration “stunningly ineffective” at working with other countries, Sen. John F. Kerry said Sunday that many nations were reluctant to join the United States’ efforts to stabilize Iraq, an approach that he has been advocating as a solution to the unrest.

“That is exactly the quandary that President Bush and this administration have put the United States of America in,” Kerry said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” with Tim Russert.

The presumptive Democratic nominee said Bush had ignored opportunities to collaborate with the United Nations and said the U.S. needs a new president to restore the country’s relations with other nations so that an international force could be created to secure Iraq.

“It may well be that we need a new president -- a breath of fresh air -- to reestablish credibility with the rest of the world so that we can have a believable administration as to how we proceed,” he said.

The Massachusetts senator, who has criticized the administration for its handling of the war in Iraq, narrowed his critique Sunday to the president’s initial approach to the attack, deflecting a question about whether the decision to invade Iraq was itself sound.

“I think the way the president went to war is a mistake,” he said.

Kerry’s focus on the lead-up to the war demonstrated how Bush’s recent endorsement of the role of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who will appoint an interim body to succeed the Iraqi Governing Council, has eliminated one of the senator’s major complaints about the administration: that it has rebuffed the help of the international community.

“Now, finally, George Bush is doing what I and others have recommended for some period of time,” Kerry said.

In a conference call later with reporters, Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot seized on the statement, calling Kerry’s performance on “Meet the Press” rife with “contradictions” and “a great deal of confusion.” Racicot, a former Montana governor, said he was “mystified” that Kerry had been calling “for something that is already being done by this president.”

But during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” national security advisor Condoleezza Rice indicated skepticism about the potential effectiveness of the U.N., saying that involving the world body was “not the panacea here.”

“The idea that somehow if there were a U.N. flag instead of a coalition flag, that these thugs would not be attacking, is, frankly, I think, just a little bit naive,” she said.

For his part, Kerry used his appearance on “Meet the Press” to seize on an assertion in a new book by Bob Woodward, a Washington Post assistant managing editor, that Bush had planned to attack Iraq early in his administration but did not inform all the members of his Cabinet.

“This president not only misleads America about my record; he misleads his own administration,” Kerry said. “He misleads his security advisor. He misleads his secretary of State about his own planning for a war.”

Kerry reaffirmed his belief that the war on terrorism was primarily an intelligence operation, saying that he would not hesitate to use U.S. forces against terrorists, but emphasized that the United States needed to devote more resources to the “war of ideas.”

Bush campaign officials ridiculed that notion. “Serving terrorists with legal papers will not win this war,” Racicot said. “This is a pre-9/11 attitude.”

Kerry spent much of Saturday in Miami huddled with advisors and aides, in part to prepare for his interview with Russert, whose tough questioning is widely viewed as a test of a candidate’s mettle.

During the morning show, taped in a Miami suburb, Russert confronted the senator with some of the more impolitic statements he made in the 1970s as a young antiwar activist.

He showed an excerpt from an interview Kerry gave the Harvard Crimson during his first congressional bid, in which the Vietnam veteran said that U.S. troops should only be deployed around the world at the directive of the United Nations.

Kerry dismissed his comment as “one of those stupid things that a 27-year-old kid says when you’re fresh back from Vietnam and angry about it.”

Later, Russert played a clip from Kerry’s first appearance on “Meet the Press” in 1971 when the young veteran said that he and other soldiers in Vietnam committed “atrocities” and called the officials who authorized the action in Vietnam “war criminals.” As he watched the video of his youthful self, Kerry grinned.

“Where did all that dark hair go, Tim?” he asked with a grin. “That’s a big question for me.” Then he turned serious.

“The words were honest, but on the other hand they were a little bit over the top,” he said of his statement at the time.

Russert also pressed Kerry on whether his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, would release her tax returns. Some Republicans have been calling for her to share information about her substantial financial wealth.

The senator said that much of the information was already available.

“If you want to see what my wife’s holdings are, plenty of people have, you can go to our Senate ethics forms,” he said. “It shows you almost entirely what we have. It’s very, very, very intrusive.”

Kerry spent the afternoon campaigning in Miami, kicking off a three-day swing through Florida. During an outdoor rally at the University of Miami, the candidate reiterated his criticism of Bush’s handling of Iraq and what he said was the president’s lukewarm embrace of an international presence.

“They also are trying to go through the back door with Ambassador Brandini,” he said, garbling the U.N. envoy’s name a third time in recent days.

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Times staff writer Richard Serrano in Washington contributed to this report.