John Kerry is not a fake cowboy. He's a real leader with a realistic understanding of the world built on dealing with real people and shaped by the experiences of war.


May 6, 2004 NY TIMES

Another Vision of Iraq

Given the almost uniformly disastrous news coming out of Iraq lately, a presidential challenger might have been tempted to mark last week's anniversary of President Bush's "mission accomplished" stunt with point-scoring sound bites. To his credit, Senator John Kerry instead offered ideas for rescuing American policy in Iraq from the rapidly deteriorating military and political situation.

His handlers might wish that Mr. Kerry was better at one-liners, but we're happy to see a national figure offer a grounded, pragmatic vision of America's role in the world.

Mr. Kerry's notions of how to persuade other countries to support the United States were a real contrast with President Bush's interviews yesterday with Arab television networks approved by the White House. In responding to Muslim rage over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Mr. Bush sometimes sounded as if he was chiding angry Arabs for not appreciating the United States' good intentions.

For months, Mr. Kerry has advocated broader international oversight of Iraq's prospective interim government, a formula that might open the door to additional peacekeeping contributions and generate some real support for nation-building there. Now he has begun to elaborate on how that oversight should be structured, drawing sensible lessons from successes and failures of the recent past.

Mr. Kerry recognizes that the United Nations cannot offer any magic bullet solutions for Iraq, and that working with Secretary General Kofi Annan and his special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, cannot be a substitute for broad cooperation with all the major powers represented in the Security Council. To this end, while endorsing Mr. Brahimi's efforts to put together a transitional Iraqi government, Mr. Kerry also proposes designating an international high commissioner for Iraq whose office would be outside the barely functional, patronage-driven U.N. personnel system. That would permit the recruitment of a capable staff and create some safeguards against the kind of wholesale corruption that is alleged to have vitiated the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq.

This feature of the Kerry proposal draws on the pattern of international oversight in Bosnia. While far from perfect, Bosnia's transition has worked out a lot better than Iraq's and elicited far wider international cooperation. Mr. Kerry also invokes the Bosnia example when he suggests that the NATO alliance be directly involved in Iraqi peacekeeping operations. That could help make NATO more relevant to the post-cold-war world and would ease the burden on America's badly strained military. An American commander would still be in overall charge of security.

Mr. Kerry's ideas would have been difficult to put into effect a year ago. They would be extremely hard to carry out now, and impossible by next January, should he defeat Mr. Bush. But they at least reflect a realistic view of what the United Nations — and the United States — can and cannot do. The Bush administration, meanwhile, clings to the unworkable notion of an American-controlled transition, an idea that grows ever more out of touch with reality as the news of the revolting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison overwhelms any remaining Iraqi faith in Washington's good intentions.




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