History Haunts Bush and Kerry

Few assumptions are more precarious for Democrats than the one that November’s presidential election is John F. Kerry’s to lose.

President Bush does have a spotty economy that is weak in job creation, a botched war in Iraq and an average approval rating around 50%, negatives that normally signal defeat for an incumbent. Short of a new terrorist attack, all this gives Democrats some basis for optimism.

Still, as the Republican convention opens this week in New York City, a site chosen to resurrect the psychologies and applause lines of the months after Sept. 11, both parties and candidates are engaged in a high-stakes and tricky contest of patriotism and memory. Not only what happened three years ago is involved, but also what both contenders were doing -- or lying about or shirking -- some three decades ago in the Vietnam era.

With Iraq and terrorism combining into a potent national security issue destined to dominate the election debate, both Kerry and Bush face close scrutiny of their military and patriotic outlooks during the Vietnam years, and both are at risk. Slowly, Vietnam and the two U.S.-led wars in Iraq have blended into a linkage of foreign-policy and national-security errors that has drained U.S. credibility and prestige.

After the triumph of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, President George H.W. Bush proclaimed to the American public that the “Vietnam syndrome” -- the lingering national trauma of military embarrassment in Indochina -- had been wiped away and “buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.” Alas, his boast was premature because Saddam Hussein survived in power. Twelve years later, son George W. captured Hussein but, as had his father, mishandled the larger challenge by miring the U.S. in a stubborn Iraqi insurgency and the country’s seemingly intractable ethnic politics.

These mistakes have already resurrected some of the terminology of Vietnam -- “White House deception,” “quagmire,” “civil war.” Unfortunately, international anger, especially in the Middle East, at the U.S. presence in Iraq has also rekindled a second discussion: How Muslim fundamentalist outrage over the arrival of U.S. troops on the Arabian Peninsula, with its holy Islamic sites, in the 1990-’91 war was a cause of the 1993 and 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.

Taken together, U.S. blunders in Iraq and the undiminished threat of Islamic terrorism in the United States have merged into a national-security concern that should dominate the presidential election.

No other issue is as important, including the economy and Iraq as an example of war mismanagement by a U.S. president. Clearly, though, the economy is a problem for Bush’s reelection. It exhibits many of the same weaknesses -- huge domestic and international deficits, job losses, wage stagnation, high family debt and a growing gap between the rich and the middle class -- that spoiled his father’s hope of a second term. Besides oil prices, there is a second yardstick by which the son’s economic record is worse than the father’s. George W. looks to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over four years of net job losses.

As for the poorly thought-out invasion of Iraq, a cavalcade of conservative commentators and politicians have lately come forth to call the decision a fundamental mistake. Two stand out. One is Pat Buchanan, an old GOP foe of both Bushes. In his new book, “Where the Right Went Wrong,” he that “listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter [Osama] bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks -- and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.” The other is retiring Nebraska Rep. Doug Bereuter, the Republican vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. In a letter to his constituents, he wrote that, “it was a mistake to launch ... military action [against Iraq]” and that America’s “reputation around the world has never been lower.”

Although Bush stands by his decision to invade Iraq, he told the New York Times last week that he made a “miscalculation of what the conditions would be” after the war ended.

All of which further frames the extraordinary importance of U.S. military involvement with Iraq and the Persian Gulf during the last 25-plus years. Two episodes in the 1980s -- the Iran-Contra affair and George H.W. Bush’s helping hand in building up Hussein’s military machine -- began the involvement. Then, in 1992, independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot accused the elder Bush of having given Hussein a “green light” to invade Kuwait in August 1990. Remember, it was to counter Hussein that Bush pressured Saudi Arabia leaders into accepting U.S. troops on their land.

If these were the only points at issue in 2004, the Democrats would be on their way to winning the White House. But for more than 30 years, the Democrats have earned an intermittently deserved reputation as a party weak on military preparedness and national security. Not surprisingly, the current President Bush and his political advisors have tried to subordinate his weaknesses and failures by painting Kerry and the Democrats as unfit to lead the nation in such matters. In doing so, they have resurrected a generation of negative images ranging from disarmament rallies to antiwar demonstrations and “wag the dog” missile strikes.

If Kerry was a full-fledged Vietnam war hero, he’d have a 6- to 10-point lead over Bush. However, he isn’t -- and he doesn’t. The largely successful portraiture coming out of the Democratic convention notwithstanding, the heroism that won Kerry his medals is partly offset by two other circumstances -- the angry antiwar stance he took in the early 1970s and the relatively minor injuries that earned him three Purple Hearts and enabled him to go home early. The anti-Kerry ads by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth rise far above skepticism to scurrilous misrepresentation, but they have partly had an effect because there is some cause for doubt in Kerry’s Vietnam stint.

One can only speculate, but Kerry’s timidity in criticizing the invasion of Iraq and the mismanagement of its aftermath may stem from his own sense of vulnerability for what he said and did 30-odd years ago. If so, that only strengthens the GOP argument that he lacks some of the qualities necessary to lead. The United States cannot afford a president whose youthful antiwar activities make it impossible for him to criticize 25 years of flawed U.S. military and national security policy in the Persian Gulf. His continued reticence may spoil his election chances.

The election is thus not necessarily Kerry’s to lose. He still has to show leadership and toughness to win it, including a willingness to risk bloodier injuries (political, to be sure) than the nicks and bruises for which he got Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

On the other hand, what Bush was doing from 1966 to 1974 falls into a period he has cagily described as, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.” During the Vietnam years, he was periodically absent from his duties with the Texas Air National Guard -- some Democrats say AWOL -- and lost his flying classification after not taking a required physical that included random drug tests. It would be ironic if the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads finally forced the Massachusetts senator to prove his toughness by a newly vigorous pursuit of the president’s own record.

This is not going to be a pleasant election, and the usual yardsticks will not apply. But there is little reason why they should apply and a persuasive argument why they shouldn’t: In 2004, Americans cannot prepare for the future without first coming to grips with troubling facts and little-understood failures that reach back into the 1960s and 1970s.