A Kerry Administration Foreign Policy

Here is a good article that outlines what a Kerry foreign policy might look like. Unfortunately, it was written for NY Times Magazine. It is way too long, meandering and finally gets to the meat of the topic in the last few pages. Below are relevant excerpts. The permalink has the whole article for those purests and for those who want concrete comparisons with Bush's policies...there are good ones.

Kerry has a much more reassuring view of the world. There are sound pragmatic reasons for that. Terrorism works by scaring a lot of people. Responding to terrorism with a Jihad of our own simply played into Al Qaeda hands. His recruiting depends upon convincing Muslims that America in on a new crusade with Israel to dominate and impose a Judeo-Christian culture on the Middle East. Bush's actions have played right into that view.

We are not in a war between countries or between civilizations as the Christian Right-wing fanatics suggest. We have a loose network of political criminals who have been emboldened by the events of the last few years to believe a new Muslim empire will rise from the ashes of Iraq. And they may well be right. An Iranian dominated Iraq will stiffle any hope of democracy in the Middle East.

Clearly Sistani is set to come to power in the election, if not in person, by surrogate. We have no idea what he will do. We do know his ties to Iran are strong. For all we know, Sadr may be his surrogate, acting as a foil to counter balence the power of the US and the flegling Iraqi government and to build his own stature in Iraq.

We are in a war of ideology. We can't win without changing the minds of millions of Muslims worldwide. We have been changing minds alright, but in the wrong direction. Bush's policies have enboldened Iran, pushed our Arab friends as far away as they have been in 40 years. We are no longer seen as a beacon of Democracy worldwide. How can we win a ideological war? Only with new leadership.

The New York Times > Magazine > Kerry's Undeclared War

''I think we can do a better job,'' Kerry said, ''of cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working cooperatively across the globe, of improving our intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally, of training our military and deploying them differently, of specializing in special forces and special ops, of working with allies, and most importantly -- and I mean most importantly -- of restoring America's reputation as a country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in the war on terror, not to diminish us.''...

More senior members of the foreign-relations committee, like Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, were far more visible and vocal on the emerging threat of Islamic terrorism. But through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals -- Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering....

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.

The challenge of beating back these nonstate actors -- not just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces -- is what Kerry meant by ''the dark side of globalization.'' He came closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at U.C.L.A. last February. ''The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations,'' he said then. ''It is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.''...

Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction. The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails....

One can infer from this that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. Wars are fought between states or between factions vying for control of a state; Al Qaeda and its many offspring are neither. If Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits....

This critical difference between the two men running for the presidency, over what kind of enemy we are fighting and how best to defeat it, is at the core of a larger debate over how the United States should involve itself in the Muslim world. Bush and Kerry are in agreement, as is just about every expert on Islamic culture you can find, that in order for Americans to live and travel securely, the United States must change the widespread perception among many Muslims worldwide that America is morally corrupt and economically exploitative. It is this resentment, felt especially strongly among Arab Muslims, that makes heroes of suicide bombers. The question vexing the foreign-policy establishment in W
ashington is how you market freedom. Is the establishment of a single, functioning democracy in the Middle East enough to win the ''hearts and minds'' of ordinary Muslims, by convincing them that America is in fact the model for a free, more open society? Or do you need to somehow strike at the underlying conditions -- despotism, hopelessness, economic and social repression -- that breed fundamentalism and violence in the first place?...

Biden, who is perhaps Kerry's closest friend in the Senate, suggests that Kerry sees Bush's advisers as beholden to the same grand and misguided theories. ''John and I never believed that, if you were successful in Iraq, you'd have governments falling like dominoes in the Middle East,'' he told me. ''The neo-cons of today are 'the best and the brightest' who brought us Vietnam. They have taken a construct that's flawed and applied it to a world that isn't relevant.''

In fact, Kerry and his advisers contend that the occupation of Iraq is creating a reverse contagion in the region; they say the fighting -- with its heavy civilian casualties and its pictures, beamed throughout the Arab world, of American aggression -- has been a boon to Al Qaeda recruiters. They frequently cite a Pentagon memo, leaked to the media last year, in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wondered whether Al Qaeda was recruiting new terrorists faster than the U.S. military could capture or kill them. ''God help us if we damage the shrine in Najaf,'' Richard Holbrooke told me on a day when marines surrounded insurgent Shiites inside the shrine, ''and we create a new group of Shiites who some years from now blow up the Statue of Liberty or something like that, all because we destroyed the holiest site in Shiism.''...

If forced democracy is ultimately Bush's panacea for the ills that haunt the world, as Kerry suggests it is, then Kerry's is diplomacy. Kerry mentions the importance of cooperating with the world community so often that some of his strongest supporters wish he would ease up a bit. (''When people hear multilateral, they think multi-mush,'' Biden despaired.) But multilateralism is not an abstraction to Kerry, whose father served as a career diplomat during the years after World War II. The only time I saw Kerry truly animated during two hours of conversation was when he talked about the ability of a president to build relationships with other leaders.

''We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days,'' Kerry told me during a rare break from campaigning, in Seattle at the end of August. ''And that's all about your diplomacy.''

When I suggested that effecting such changes could take many years, Kerry shook his head vehemently and waved me off.

''Yeah, it is long-term, but it can be dramatically effective in the short term. It really can be. I promise you.'' He leaned his head back and slapped his thighs. ''A new presidency with the right moves, the right language, the right outreach, the right initiatives, can dramatically alter the world's perception of us very, very quickly.

''I know Mubarak well enough to know what I think I could achieve in the messaging and in the press in Egypt,'' Kerry went on. ''And, similarly, with Jordan and with King Abdullah, and what we can do in terms of transformation in the economics of the region by getting American businesspeople involved, getting some stability and really beginning to proactively move in those ways. We just haven't been doing any of this stuff. We've been stunningly disengaged, with the exception of Iraq.

''I mean, you ever hear anything about the 'road map' anymore?'' he asked, referring to the international plan for phasing in peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which Kerry supports. ''No. You ever hear anything about anything anymore? No. Do you hear anything about this greater Middle East initiative, the concepts or anything? No. I think we're fighting a very narrow, myopic kind of war.''

It is not a coincidence that Kerry's greatest success in the Senate came not during his long run of investigations but in the realm of diplomacy. He and John McCain worked for several years to settle the controversy over P.O.W.-M.I.A.'s and to normalize relations with Vietnam -- an achievement that Kerry's Senate colleagues consider his finest moment. ''He should talk about it more,'' Bob Kerrey said. ''He transformed the region.'' In the same way, John Kerry sees himself as a kind of ambassador-president, shuttling to world capitals and reintegrating America, by force of personality, into the world community.

He would begin, if sworn into office, by going immediately to the United Nations to deliver a speech recasting American foreign policy. Whereas Bush has branded North Korea ''evil'' and refuses to negotiate head on with its authoritarian regime, Kerry would open bilateral talks over its burgeoning nuclear program. Similarly, he has said he would rally other nations behind sanctions against Iran if that country refuses to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Kerry envisions appointing a top-level envoy to restart the Middle East peace process, and he's intent on getting India and Pakistan to adopt key provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (One place where Kerry vows to take a harder line than Bush is Pakistan, where Bush has embraced the military ruler Pervez Musharraf, and where Kerry sees a haven for chaos in the vast and lawless region on the border with Afghanistan.) In all of this, Kerry intends to use as leverage America's considerable capacity for economic aid; a Kerry adviser told me, only slightly in jest, that Kerry's most tempting fantasy is to attend the G-8 summit.

erry's view, that the 21st century will be defined by the organized world's struggle against agents of chaos and lawlessness, might be the beginning of a compelling vision. The idea that America and its allies, sharing resources and using the latest technologies, could track the movements of terrorists, seize their bank accounts and carry out targeted military strikes to eliminate them, seems more optimistic and more practical than the notion that the conventional armies of the United States will inevitably have to punish or even invade every Islamic country that might abet radicalism.

And yet, you can understand why Kerry has been so tentative in advancing this idea. It's comforting to think that Al Qaeda might be as easily marginalized as a bunch of drug-running thugs, that an ''effective'' assault on its bank accounts might cripple its twisted campaign against Americans. But Americans are frightened -- an emotion that has benefited Bush, and one that he has done little to dissuade -- and many of them perceive a far more existential threat to their lives than the one Kerry describes. In this climate, Kerry's rather dry recitations about money-laundering laws and intelligence-sharing agreements can sound oddly discordant. We are living at a time that feels historically consequential, where people seem to expect -- and perhaps deserve -- a theory of the world that matches the scope of their insecurity.

Theoretically, Kerry could still find a way to wrap his ideas into some bold and cohesive construct for the next half-century -- a Kerry Doctrine, perhaps, or a campaign against chaos, rather than a war on terror -- that people will understand and relate to. But he has always been a man who prides himself on appreciating the subtleties of public policy, and everything in his experience has conditioned him to avoid unsubtle constructs and grand designs. His aversion to Big Think has resulted in one of the campaign's oddities: it is Bush, the man vilified by liberals as intellectually vapid, who has emerged as the de facto visionary in the campaign, trying to impose some long-term thematic order on a dangerous and disord
erly world, while Kerry carves the globe into a series of discrete problems with specific solutions.

When Kerry first told me that Sept. 11 had not changed him, I was surprised. I assumed everyone in America -- and certainly in Washington -- had been changed by that day. I assumed he was being overly cautious, afraid of providing his opponents with yet another cheap opportunity to call him a flip-flopper. What I came to understand was that, in fact, the attacks really had not changed the way Kerry viewed or talked about terrorism -- which is exactly why he has come across, to some voters, as less of a leader than he could be. He may well have understood the threat from Al Qaeda long before the rest of us. And he may well be right, despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty vision might have seemed more satisfying -- and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign -- in a world where the twin towers still stood.


Complete Article

Kerry's Undeclared War

October 10, 2004

By MATT BAI

As New York and Washington were under attack on Sept. 11,

2001, a film crew happened to come upon John Kerry leaving

the Capitol. The brief moment of footage, included in a BBC

documentary called ''Clear the Skies,'' tells us something,

perhaps, about Kerry in a crisis. The camera captures

Congressional aides and visitors, clearly distraught and

holding onto one another, streaming down the back steps of

the Capitol building in near panic, following the bellowed

instructions of anxious police. Off to one side of the

screen, there is Kerry, alone, his long legs carrying him

calmly down the steps, his neck craning toward the sky, as

if he were watching a gathering rainstorm. His face and

demeanor appear unworried. Kerry could be a man lost in his

thoughts who just happens to have wandered onto the set of

a disaster film.

''I remember looking up at the sky as I walked down the

steps,'' Kerry told me recently, when I asked him about the

film clip. He said that he and other members of the

Senate's Democratic leadership had just watched on

television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center,

and shortly after that they heard the sonic boom of an

explosion and saw, through a large window, the black smoke

rise from the Pentagon. ''We'd had some warning that there

was some airplane in the sky. And I remember seeing a great

big plane -- I think it was a 747 or something -- up there,

but it wasn't moving in a way that, you know, I was

particularly concerned. I remember feeling a rage, a huge

anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This

is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war.'''

After leaving the Capitol on that terrible day, Kerry

walked across the street to his office in the Russell

Senate building, where he made sure that his staff had been

evacuated and was safe. Reluctant to leave Capitol Hill, he

watched TV coverage in his office and saw the second tower

fall. He called his older daughter, Alexandra, who was

living in New York, and his wife, Teresa, who was in

Washington. Those who saw Kerry that morning recall mainly

that he was furious, an emotion, those close to him say,

that comes easily to him in times of trial. He thought it

was a mistake to shut down the Capitol, to show terrorists

that they had the power to send the United States

government into hiding.

''You know, my instinct was, Where's my gun?'' Kerry told

me. ''How do you fight back? I wanted to do something.''

That evening, sitting at home, he called an aide and said

he wanted to go to New York that very night to help the

rescuers; he was ultimately convinced that such a trip was

logistically impossible. In the days ahead, Kerry would

make two trips to ground zero to see what remained of the

carnage.



With the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the geopolitical

currents that Washington had spent half a century mastering

shifted all at once. It isn't clear how long it took Kerry

-- a senator for nearly 20 years and, in September 2001, an

undeclared candidate for the presidency -- to understand

the political magnitude of that change. George W. Bush and

his advisers got it almost instantly. Few men get to be

president, and far fewer get to be president at a critical,

transformative moment; Bush, seizing the opportunity,

recast himself as the accidental protagonist of a new and

dramatic national narrative. Less than a year removed from

a disputed election, he set about elbowing his way into the

small pantheon of modern presidents -- F.D.R. after Pearl

Harbor, Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- who led

the nation in profound moments of peril.

Before the smoke had even dissipated over Manhattan, Bush

presented the country with an ambitious, overarching

construct for a new era in foreign relations. ''The war on

terror,'' as he put it, was this generation's test of

military and ideological resolve, different from the ones

that came before with regard to tactics, perhaps, but not

in the magnitude of the challenges or the ambition of the

enemy. Bush explained that Al Qaeda and its allies and

imitators would constitute a new kind of menace in the

years ahead, stealthier and less predictable than past

enemies. And yet, in their opposition to American

principles and the threat they posed to the nation, he

suggested, the Islamic terrorists were the equivalent of

Hitler and Stalin, and defeating them would require the

same steel and the same conviction that guided America in

the last century's campaigns.

While Bush and much of the country seemed remade by the

historic events of 9/11, Democrats in Washington were slow

to understand that the attacks had to change them in some

way too. What adjustments they made were, at first,

defensive. Spooked by Bush's surging popularity and the

nation's suddenly ascendant mood of patriotism, Democrats

stifled their instinctive concerns over civil liberties;

and whatever their previous misgivings about intervention,

many Congressional Democrats, a year after the terrorist

attacks, voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

What few Democrats did at the time was think creatively

about the new world of foreign policy. The candidates who

began their runs for the presidency last year, from Dennis

Kucinich and his peace platform on the left to Joe

Lieberman and Dick Gephardt on the other side of the

spectrum, attacked the president's foreign policy from

different directions, but if any new ideas emerged during

those months, they were soon drowned out by the booming

anti-war voice of Howard Dean. When Kerry emerged as the

most palatable alternative, he at first ran mostly on the

viability of his personal story, focusing more on his

combat experience in Vietnam than on any plan to fight Al

Qaeda or remake Iraq. Only since Labor Day has Kerry begun

to sharpen his distinctions with Bush on national security

and foreign policy. In a series of combative speeches and

statements, and in a crisp performance at the first

head-to-head debate, Kerry has argued that Bush's war in

Iraq is a disaster, that troops should be brought home

before the end of the next presidential term and that the

Iraq war is a ''profound diversion'' from the war on terror

and the real showdown with Al Qaeda.

What Kerry still has not done is to articulate clearly a

larger foreign-policy vision, his own overarching

alternative to Bush's global war on terror. The difference

between the two men was clear during the foreign-policy

debate in Florida 10 days ago. Kerry seemed dominant for

much of the exchange, making clear arguments on a range of

specific challenges -- the war in Iraq, negotiations with

North Korea, relations with Russia. But while Kerry bore in

on ground-level details, Bush, in defending his policies,

seemed, characteristica
lly, to be looking at the world from

a much higher altitude, repeating in his brief and

sometimes agitated statements a single unifying worldview:

America is the world's great force for freedom, unsparing

in its use of pre-emptive might and unstinting in its

determination to stamp out tyranny and terrorism. Kerry

seemed to offer no grand thematic equivalent.

Inside liberal think-tanks, there are Democratic

foreign-policy experts who are challenging some of Bush's

most basic assumptions about the post-9/11 world --

including, most provocatively, the very idea that we are,

in fact, in a war. But Kerry has tended to steer clear of

this conversation, preferring to attack Bush for the way he

is fighting terrorism rather than for the way in which he

perceives and frames the threat itself.

The argument going on in Washington has its roots in the

dark years of the cold war. Just about everyone agrees that

many factors contributed to America's triumph over world

communism -- but people differ on which of those factors

were most important. The neo-conservatives who shaped

Reagan's anti-Soviet policy and now shape Bush's war on

terror have long held that the ''twilight struggle'' with

the Soviet empire was won primarily as a result of U.S.

military intervention in several hemispheres and of

Reagan's massive arms buildup, without which democracy and

free markets could not have taken hold. Many liberals, on

the other hand, have never been comfortable with that

premise; while they acknowledge that American military

power played a role, they contend that the long ideological

struggle with communism ended chiefly because the stifling

economic and social tenets of Marxism were unsustainable,

and because a new leader emerged -- Mikhail Gorbachev --

who understood that. They see Islamic fanaticism,

similarly, as a repressive ideology, born of complex

societal conditions, that won't be defeated by any

predominately military solution.

In the liberal view, the enemy this time -- an entirely new

kind of ''non-state actor'' known as Al Qaeda -- more

closely resembles an especially murderous drug cartel than

it does the vaunted Red Army. Instead of military might,

liberal thinkers believe, the moment calls for a

combination of expansive diplomacy abroad and interdiction

at home, an effort more akin to the war on drugs than to

any conventional war of the last century.

Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should

include a strong military option argue that the ''war on

terror'' is a flawed construct. ''We're not in a war on

terror, in the literal sense,'' says Richard Holbrooke, the

Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's

secretary of state. ''The war on terror is like saying 'the

war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really

talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that

people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''

These competing philosophies, neo-conservative and liberal,

aren't mutually exclusive, of course. Neo-cons will agree

that military operations are just one facet, albeit the

main one, of their response to terrorism. And liberals are

almost unanimous in their support for military force when

the nation or its allies face an imminent and preventable

threat; not only did the vast majority of liberal policy

makers support the invasion of Afghanistan, but many also

thought it should have been pursued more aggressively.

Still, the philosophical difference between the two camps,

applied to a conflict that may well last a generation, is

both deep and distinct. Fundamentally, Bush sees the war on

terror as a military campaign, not simply to protect

American lives but also to preserve and spread American

values around the world; his liberal critics see it more as

an ideological campaign, one that will turn back a tide of

resentment toward Americans and thus limit the peril they

face at home.

Perhaps the most pressing question of the presidential

campaign is where John Kerry stands in this debate. The man

who would be the first Vietnam veteran to occupy the Oval

Office has doggedly tried to merge both worldviews,

repeatedly vowing to fight both a more fierce and a more

restrained, multifaceted war on terror. Aides say this is

evidence of his capacity to envision complex solutions for

a complex world; voters, through the summer and early fall,

seemed less impressed. In a typical poll conducted by The

Washington Post and ABC News just before the first

presidential debate, only 37 percent of the respondents

agreed with the statement that Kerry would make the country

safer. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in

mid-September found that half the respondents thought Bush

would make the right decisions to protect the nation from

terrorism, compared with only 26 percent who said the same

thing about Kerry.

More surprising than the poll numbers, though, is the sense

of frustration, expressed not just by voters but by some in

Kerry's own party, that even at this late hour, Kerry's

long-term strategy for defeating the terrorists remains so

ethereal. ''You will lose, and we will win,'' Kerry told

America's enemies in the most memorable line of his

convention speech in late July. ''The future doesn't belong

to fear. It belongs to freedom.'' But how will we win? How

do you root out and destroy Islamic radicals while at the

same time capturing the ''hearts and minds'' of Islamic

students? When John Kerry said, on Sept. 11, 2001, ''This

is war,'' what precisely did he mean?

On an evening in August, just after a campaign swing

through the Southwest, Kerry and I met, for the second of

three conversations about terrorism and national security,

in a hotel room overlooking the Ferris wheel on the Santa

Monica pier. A row of Evian water bottles had been

thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.

''Can we get any of my water?'' he asked Stephanie Cutter,

his communications director, who dutifully scurried from

the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he

didn't like about Evian.

''I hate that stuff,'' Kerry explained to me. ''They pack

it full of minerals.''

''What kind of water do you drink?'' I asked, trying to

make conversation.

''Plain old American water,'' he said.

''You mean tap

water?''

''No,'' Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense

some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going

through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water,

then he might say I'm out of touch with ordinary voters.

But doesn't demanding my own brand of water seem even more

aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French -- important to

stay away from anything even remotely French.

''There are all kinds of waters,'' he said finally. Pause.

''Saratoga Spring.'' This seemed to have exhausted his

list. ''Sometimes I drink tap water,''
he added.

After months of having his every word scrutinized by

reporters and mocked by Republicans, Kerry appeared to

sense danger in the most mundane of places. Interviewing

him reminded me at times of what I'd read in ''Tour of

Duty,'' the historian Douglas Brinkley's flattering account

of Kerry's service in Vietnam. The Swift boat crews on the

Mekong Delta and the Ca Mau Peninsula did not aspire to be

heroic, although they were. Kerry and the young sailors

were given patrol missions that seemed unnecessarily

dangerous; their job was essentially to prove the point

that Americans could traverse the windy rivers of the

delta, rife with Vietcong, and lure the enemy out into the

open. They traveled slowly and kept watch in all

directions, and if their leader got them from point A to

point B and back again without serious casualties, he had

done his job.

Kerry seems to find presidential politics in the era of

Karl Rove as treacherous as riverine warfare, and he has

run for the presidency in much the same way. From the

beginning, Kerry's advisers said that the election would be

principally a referendum on Bush, whose approval ratings,

reflecting public anxiety over Iraq and a sluggish economy,

were consistently low for a president seeking re-election.

All Kerry had to do to win, the thinking went, was to meet

a basic threshold of acceptability with voters and avoid

doing or saying anything that might be fatally stupid. The

riverbanks were lined with hostile Republicans and

reporters, lying in wait for him, and Kerry's goal as he

sailed upriver was simple: Stay down. Exercise caution. Get

to November in one piece.

Which is exactly what it's like to interview Kerry as he

runs for the presidency; he acts as if you've been sent to

destroy him, and he can't quite figure out why in the world

he should be sitting across from you. When I met him for

our first conversation, in his cabin aboard the 757 that

shuttles his campaign around the country, Kerry didn't

extend his hand or even look up to greet me when I entered,

and he grew so quickly and obviously exasperated with my

questions about his thoughts and votes on Iraq that he cut

the interview short. (Embarrassed aides later told me he

had been abruptly roused from a nap.) He was far more

gracious in our subsequent conversations about terrorism

and foreign policy, but he still spent a lot of the time

repeating phrases from his stump speech. (''You will lose,

we will win,'' and so on.) What some politicians -- Bill

Clinton comes to mind -- might have considered an

opportunity to persuade and impress voters, Kerry seemed to

regard only as an invitation to do himself harm.

Kerry's guardedness has contributed to the impression that

he does not think clearly or boldly about foreign policy.

In his short but fascinating book titled ''Surprise,

Security and the American Experience,'' the Yale historian

John Lewis Gaddis suggests that Bush's framework for

fighting terrorism has its roots in the lofty, idealistic

tradition of John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson. (The

book was so popular in the White House that Gaddis was

invited over for a discussion.) ''What Bush is proposing is

quite long-term, quite radical and quite Wilsonian,''

Gaddis told me when we spoke; when I asked him about Kerry,

he said: ''I don't know where Kerry is on this. I don't

have the slightest clue.''

Kerry's adversaries have found it easy to ridicule his

views on foreign policy, suggesting that his idea of

counterterrorism is simply to go around arresting all the

terrorists. This is what Dick Cheney was getting at when he

said last month that there was a danger, should Kerry be

elected, that ''we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set,

if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just

criminal acts, and that we're not really at war.'' These

barbs have some resonance, largely because Kerry is so

obviously defensive about them; talking to him, you

sometimes get the sense that he would gladly throw on a

pair of night-vision goggles and abduct a member of his own

staff if he thought it would prove he could be as tough on

terror as his opponent. (When I asked one Kerry adviser

what it was that voters needed to know about Kerry and

terrorism, he replied without hesitation. ''That he's

strong and tough,'' he said. ''In the case of John Kerry,

unlike Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, he's looked people

in the face and shot them dead.'')

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Kerry hasn't been

eager to challenge Bush's grand notion of a war on terror;

such a distinction might sound weak, equivocal or, worse

yet, nuanced. It's equally unsurprising that, in the recent

Times poll, 57 percent of the respondents said Kerry hadn't

made his plans for the country clear, and 63 percent

believed he said what he thought people wanted to hear,

rather than what he actually thought. This reflected savage

Republican attacks on Kerry's character, to be sure, but it

probably also had something to do with the fact that he

hadn't made his plans clear and seemed to be saying what he

thought people wanted to hear.

When I asked Kerry's campaign advisers about these poll

numbers, what I heard from some of them in response was

that Kerry's theories on global affairs were just too

complex for the electorate and would have been ignored --

or, worse yet, mangled -- by the press. ''Yes, he should

have laid out this issue and many others in greater detail

and with more intellectual creativity, there's no

question,'' one adviser told me. ''But it would have had no

effect.''

This is, of course, a common Democratic refrain:

Republicans sound more coherent because they see the world

in such a rudimentary way, while Democrats, 10 steps ahead

of the rest of the country, wrestle with profound policy

issues that don't lend themselves to slogans. By this

reasoning, any proposal that can be explained concisely to

voters is, by definition, ineffective and lacking in

gravitas. Other Kerry aides blame the candidate and his

coterie of message makers, most of whom are legendary for

their attack ads but less adept at thinking about broad

policy arguments. ''If you talk about this the right way,

then the American people, or most of them, will get it,''

one of Kerry's informal advisers told me. ''But you've got

to have guts.''

This is the Republican line on Kerry -- that he lacks guts.

Kerry's often wobbly attempt to be both like and unlike

Bush in his approach to terrorism and the war in Iraq

enabled the Bush team, by the time Kerry and I spoke in

August, to portray him, devastatingly, as a

''flip-flopper'' who careens from one position to another.

In our conversation, Kerry seemed unusually sensitive to

these allegations, to the point where he seemed unwilling

to admit to having evolved or grown in the way that

politi
cians -- or human beings, for that matter --

generally do. When I asked Kerry how Sept. 11 had changed

him, either personally or politically, he seemed to freeze

for a moment.

''It accelerated -- '' He paused. ''I mean, it didn't

change me much at all. It just sort of accelerated,

confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought

we needed to be doing. I mean, to me, it wasn't as

transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration

and an urgency that we weren't doing the kinds of things

necessary to prevent it and to deal with it.''

Kerry did allow that he, like other Americans, felt less

safe after 9/11. ''Look, until a few months ago,'' he said,

referring to the time before he was enveloped in a Secret

Service escort and whisked around on charter planes, ''I

was flying like everybody else, you know, going through

things. Absolutely, I've looked at people very carefully on

an airplane. I'd look at shoes. I'd check people who I

thought might be a little squirrelly. Going into crowded

events, I feel very much on the alert.''

Bush attacked Kerry earlier in the campaign over this

question of whether the war on terror was really a war.

(''My opponent indicated that he's not comfortable using

the word 'war' to describe the struggle we're in,'' Bush

said, although whether Kerry had actually said that is

debatable.) Now that I'd heard Holbrooke and others say

flat out that we weren't in an actual war, I wanted to hear

what Kerry thought. Is this a real war, or a metaphorical

one? I asked him. Is ''war'' the right word to use?

''There's a danger in it,'' Kerry said, nodding. ''But it's

real,'' he went on, meaning the war itself. ''You know,

when your buildings are bombed and 3,000 people get killed,

and airplanes are hijacked, and a nation is terrorized the

way we were, and people continue to plot to do you injury,

that's an act of war, and it's serious business. But it's a

different kind of war. You have to understand that this is

not the sands of Iwo Jima. This is a completely new,

different kind of war from any we've fought previously.''

Kerry told me he would stop terrorists by going after them

ruthlessly with the military, and he faulted Bush, as he

often does, for choosing to use Afghan militias, instead of

American troops, to pursue Osama bin Laden into the

mountains of Tora Bora, where he disappeared. ''I'm

certainly, you know, not going to take second seat to

anybody, to nobody, in my willingness to seek justice and

set America on a course -- to make America safe,'' Kerry

told me. ''And that requires destroying terrorists. And I'm

committed to doing that. But I think I have a better way of

doing it. I can do it more effectively.''

This was a word that Kerry came back to repeatedly in our

discussions; he told me he would wage a more ''effective''

war on terror no less than 18 times in two hours of

conversations. The question, of course, was how.

''I think we can do a better job,'' Kerry said, ''of

cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working

cooperatively across the globe, of improving our

intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally,

of training our military and deploying them differently, of

specializing in special forces and special ops, of working

with allies, and most importantly -- and I mean most

importantly -- of restoring America's reputation as a

country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our

side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our

high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in

the war on terror, not to diminish us.''

This last point was what Kerry seemed to be getting at with

his mantra of ''effectiveness,'' and it was in fact the

main thrust of his campaign pitch about terrorism. By

infuriating allies and diminishing the country's

international esteem, Kerry argued, Bush had made it

impossible for America to achieve its goals abroad. By the

simple act of changing presidents, the country would

greatly increase its chances of success in the global war

on terror. Both candidates, in fact, were suggesting that

the main difference between them was one of leadership

style and not policy; just as Bush had taken to arguing

that Kerry was too inconstant to lead a nation at war,

Kerry's critique centered on the idea that Bush had proved

himself too stubborn and arrogant to represent America to

the rest of the world.

But when you listen carefully to what Bush and Kerry say,

it becomes clear that the differences between them are more

profound than the matter of who can be more effective in

achieving the same ends. Bush casts the war on terror as a

vast struggle that is likely to go on indefinitely, or at

least as long as radical Islam commands fealty in regions

of the world. In a rare moment of either candor or

carelessness, or perhaps both, Bush told Matt Lauer on the

''Today'' show in August that he didn't think the United

States could actually triumph in the war on terror in the

foreseeable future. ''I don't think you can win it,'' he

said -- a statement that he and his aides tried to disown

but that had the ring of sincerity to it. He and other

members of his administration have said that Americans

should expect to be attacked again, and that the constant

shadow of danger that hangs over major cities like New York

and Washington is the cost of freedom. In his rhetoric,

Bush suggests that terrorism for this generation of

Americans is and should be an overwhelming and frightening

reality.

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel

safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview.

''We have to get back to the place we were, where

terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a

nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement

person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're

never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to

reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on

the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day,

and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to

fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it

seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's

philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor,

was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that,

was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If

mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy

clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for

their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us.

Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the

race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential

of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war

suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that

all of this horror -- planes flying into buildin
gs, anxiety

about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could

somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our

thoughts.



Kerry came to his worldview over the course of a Senate

career that has been, by any legislative standard, a quiet

affair. Beginning in the late 80's, Kerry's Subcommittee on

Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations

investigated and exposed connections between Latin American

drug dealers and BCCI, the international bank that was

helping to launder drug money. That led to more

investigations of arms dealers, money laundering and

terrorist financing.

Kerry turned his work on the committee into a book on

global crime, titled ''The New War,'' published in 1997. He

readily admitted to me that the book ''wasn't exclusively

on Al Qaeda''; in fact, it barely mentioned the rise of

Islamic extremism. But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he

said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple

drug lords, including governments working jointly to share

intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify

suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful

tools in the war on terror.

''Of all the records in the Senate, if you don't mind my

saying, I think I was ahead of the curve on this entire

dark side of globalization,'' he said. ''I think that the

Senate committee report on contras, narcotics and drugs, et

cetera, is a seminal report. People have based research

papers on it. People have based documents on it, movies on

it. I think it was a significant piece of work.''

More senior members of the foreign-relations committee,

like Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, were far more visible and

vocal on the emerging threat of Islamic terrorism. But

through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a

wide array of international criminals -- Latin American

drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one

thing in common: they were able to move money around

through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and

with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that

forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry

Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements,

foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on

their banks for potential money laundering or they risked

losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry

tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them

blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee,

would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act;

among other things, these measures subject banks to fines

or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the

identities of their customers and to avoid being used for

money laundering.

Through his immersion in the global underground, Kerry made

connections among disparate criminal and terrorist groups

that few other senators interested in foreign policy were

making in the 90's. Richard A. Clarke, who coordinated

security and counterterrorism policy for George W. Bush and

Bill Clinton, credits Kerry with having seen beyond the

national-security tableau on which most of his colleagues

were focused. ''He was getting it at the same time that

people like Tony Lake were getting it, in the '93 -'94 time

frame,'' Clarke says, referring to Anthony Lake, Clinton's

national security adviser. ''And the 'it' here was that

there was a new nonstate-actor threat, and that

nonstate-actor threat was a blended threat that didn't fit

neatly into the box of organized criminal, or neatly into

the box of terrorism. What you found were groups that were

all of the above.''

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in

Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an

entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by

two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower,

to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension

between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however,

that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy

groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed

with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase

bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to

make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited

weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to

destabilize them.

The challenge of beating back these nonstate actors -- not

just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces -- is

what Kerry meant by ''the dark side of globalization.'' He

came closest to articulating this as an actual

foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at U.C.L.A. last

February. ''The war on terror is not a clash of

civilizations,'' he said then. ''It is a clash of

civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity

against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.''

This stands in significant contrast to the Bush doctrine,

which holds that the war on terror, if not exactly a clash

of civilizations, is nonetheless a struggle between those

states that would promote terrorism and those that would

exterminate it. Bush, like Kerry, accepts the premise that

America is endangered mainly by a new kind of adversary

that claims no state or political entity as its own. But he

does not accept the idea that those adversaries can

ultimately survive and operate independently of states; in

fact, he asserts that terrorist groups are inevitably the

subsidiaries of irresponsible regimes. ''We must be

prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist

clients,'' the National Security Strategy said, in a

typical passage, ''before they are able to threaten or use

weapons of mass destruction against the United States and

our allies and friends.''

By singling out three states in particular- Iraq, North

Korea and Iran -- as an ''axis of evil,'' and by invading

Iraq on the premise that it did (or at least might) sponsor

terrorism, Bush cemented the idea that his war on terror is

a war against those states that, in the president's words,

are not with us but against us. Many of Bush's advisers

spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their

foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are

the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that

they can -- and should -- be forced to exercise control

over the violent groups that take root within their

borders.

Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the

very premise of civilized states, rather than any one

ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting

alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because

terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter

their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no

capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb,

no ambassadors to recall, no
economies to sanction. The

U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for

the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire

missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these

disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated

network of diabolical villains, more connected to one

another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one

state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits

the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a

unified community of nations can ensure that order

prevails.

One can infer from this that if Kerry were able to speak

less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a

political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers

do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. Wars are

fought between states or between factions vying for control

of a state; Al Qaeda and its many offspring are neither. If

Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law

enforcement probably is the most important, though not the

only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need

passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive

and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and

fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al

Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a

criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated

and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler

and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind

of stature that might actually work in their favor,

enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

This critical difference between the two men running for

the presidency, over what kind of enemy we are fighting and

how best to defeat it, is at the core of a larger debate

over how the United States should involve itself in the

Muslim world. Bush and Kerry are in agreement, as is just

about every expert on Islamic culture you can find, that in

order for Americans to live and travel securely, the United

States must change the widespread perception among many

Muslims worldwide that America is morally corrupt and

economically exploitative. It is this resentment, felt

especially strongly among Arab Muslims, that makes heroes

of suicide bombers. The question vexing the foreign-policy

establishment in Washington is how you market freedom. Is

the establishment of a single, functioning democracy in the

Middle East enough to win the ''hearts and minds'' of

ordinary Muslims, by convincing them that America is in

fact the model for a free, more open society? Or do you

need to somehow strike at the underlying conditions --

despotism, hopelessness, economic and social repression --

that breed fundamentalism and violence in the first place?

''You've got to do something to acknowledge the gulf that

exists between the dispossessed Arab world and us, because

it's huge,'' says Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator

who is now president of New School University and who

served on the independent 9/11 commission. ''We don't have

enough money, we don't have enough parents who are willing

to give up their sons and daughters, to win this with our

Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. We

don't have the bodies to do it. So if you don't have a real

agenda of hope that's as hard-headed and tough as your

military and law-enforcement agenda, we're not going to win

this thing.''

The neo-conservatives have advanced a viral theory of

democracy. In their view, establishing a model democracy in

the Arab world, by force if necessary, no matter how many

years and lives it takes, would ultimately benefit not only

the people of that country but also America too. A free and

democratic Iraq, to take the favorite example, will cause

the people of other repressive countries in the region to

rise up and demand American-style freedom, and these

democratic nations will no longer be breeding pools for

nihilistic terrorists. Like so much of Bush's policy, this

kind of thinking harks directly back to the cold war. The

domino theory that took hold during the 1950's maintained

that an ideological change in one nation -- ''going''

communist or democratic -- could infect its neighbor; it

was based in part on the idea that ideologies could be

contagious.

Bush crystallized the new incarnation of this idea in his

convention speech last month, notable for the unapologetic

sweep and clarity of its vision. ''The terrorists know that

a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle

East will discredit their radical ideology of hate,'' the

president said. ''I believe in the transformational power

of liberty. As the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq seize

the moment, their example will send a message of hope

throughout a vital region. Palestinians will hear the

message that democracy and reform are within their reach,

and so is peace with our good friend Israel. Young women

across the Middle East will hear the message that their day

of equality and justice is coming. Young men will hear the

message that national progress and dignity are found in

liberty, not tyranny and terror.''

Kerry, too, envisions a freer and more democratic Middle

East. But he flatly rejects the premise of viral democracy,

particularly when the virus is introduced at gunpoint. ''In

this administration, the approach is that democracy is the

automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the

region,'' he told me. Kerry disagreed. ''You can't impose

it on people,'' he said. ''You have to bring them to it.

You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the

process.''

Those who know Kerry say this belief is in part a reaction

to his own experience in Vietnam, where one understanding

of the domino theory (''if Vietnam goes communist, all of

Asia will fall'') led to the death of 58,000 Americans, and

another (''the South Vietnamese crave democracy'') ran up

against the realities of life in a poor, long-war-ravaged

country. The people of Vietnam, Kerry found, were

susceptible neither to the dogma of communism nor the

persuasiveness of American ''liberation.'' As the young

Kerry said during his 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee: ''We found most people didn't even

know the difference between communism and democracy. They

only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters

strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages

and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to

do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of

the United States of America, to leave them alone in

peace.''

Biden, who is perhaps Kerry's closest friend in the Senate,

suggests that Kerry sees Bush's advisers as beholden to the

same grand and misguided theories. ''John and I never

believed that, if you were successful in Iraq, you'd have

governments falling like dominoes in the Middle Eas
t,'' he

told me. ''The neo-cons of today are 'the best and the

brightest' who brought us Vietnam. They have taken a

construct that's flawed and applied it to a world that

isn't relevant.''

In fact, Kerry and his advisers contend that the occupation

of Iraq is creating a reverse contagion in the region; they

say the fighting -- with its heavy civilian casualties and

its pictures, beamed throughout the Arab world, of American

aggression -- has been a boon to Al Qaeda recruiters. They

frequently cite a Pentagon memo, leaked to the media last

year, in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wondered

whether Al Qaeda was recruiting new terrorists faster than

the U.S. military could capture or kill them. ''God help us

if we damage the shrine in Najaf,'' Richard Holbrooke told

me on a day when marines surrounded insurgent Shiites

inside the shrine, ''and we create a new group of Shiites

who some years from now blow up the Statue of Liberty or

something like that, all because we destroyed the holiest

site in Shiism.''



If forced democracy is ultimately Bush's panacea for the

ills that haunt the world, as Kerry suggests it is, then

Kerry's is diplomacy. Kerry mentions the importance of

cooperating with the world community so often that some of

his strongest supporters wish he would ease up a bit.

(''When people hear multilateral, they think multi-mush,''

Biden despaired.) But multilateralism is not an abstraction

to Kerry, whose father served as a career diplomat during

the years after World War II. The only time I saw Kerry

truly animated during two hours of conversation was when he

talked about the ability of a president to build

relationships with other leaders.

''We need to engage more directly and more respectfully

with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious

leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this

is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the

old forces they remember from the colonial days,'' Kerry

told me during a rare break from campaigning, in Seattle at

the end of August. ''And that's all about your diplomacy.''



When I suggested that effecting such changes could take

many years, Kerry shook his head vehemently and waved me

off.

''Yeah, it is long-term, but it can be dramatically

effective in the short term. It really can be. I promise

you.'' He leaned his head back and slapped his thighs. ''A

new presidency with the right moves, the right language,

the right outreach, the right initiatives, can dramatically

alter the world's perception of us very, very quickly.

''I know Mubarak well enough to know what I think I could

achieve in the messaging and in the press in Egypt,'' Kerry

went on. ''And, similarly, with Jordan and with King

Abdullah, and what we can do in terms of transformation in

the economics of the region by getting American

businesspeople involved, getting some stability and really

beginning to proactively move in those ways. We just

haven't been doing any of this stuff. We've been stunningly

disengaged, with the exception of Iraq.

''I mean, you ever hear anything about the 'road map'

anymore?'' he asked, referring to the international plan

for phasing in peace between Israel and the Palestinians,

which Kerry supports. ''No. You ever hear anything about

anything anymore? No. Do you hear anything about this

greater Middle East initiative, the concepts or anything?

No. I think we're fighting a very narrow, myopic kind of

war.''

It is not a coincidence that Kerry's greatest success in

the Senate came not during his long run of investigations

but in the realm of diplomacy. He and John McCain worked

for several years to settle the controversy over

P.O.W.-M.I.A.'s and to normalize relations with Vietnam --

an achievement that Kerry's Senate colleagues consider his

finest moment. ''He should talk about it more,'' Bob Kerrey

said. ''He transformed the region.'' In the same way, John

Kerry sees himself as a kind of ambassador-president,

shuttling to world capitals and reintegrating America, by

force of personality, into the world community.

He would begin, if sworn into office, by going immediately

to the United Nations to deliver a speech recasting

American foreign policy. Whereas Bush has branded North

Korea ''evil'' and refuses to negotiate head on with its

authoritarian regime, Kerry would open bilateral talks over

its burgeoning nuclear program. Similarly, he has said he

would rally other nations behind sanctions against Iran if

that country refuses to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Kerry envisions appointing a top-level envoy to restart the

Middle East peace process, and he's intent on getting India

and Pakistan to adopt key provisions of the Nuclear

Nonproliferation Treaty. (One place where Kerry vows to

take a harder line than Bush is Pakistan, where Bush has

embraced the military ruler Pervez Musharraf, and where

Kerry sees a haven for chaos in the vast and lawless region

on the border with Afghanistan.) In all of this, Kerry

intends to use as leverage America's considerable capacity

for economic aid; a Kerry adviser told me, only slightly in

jest, that Kerry's most tempting fantasy is to attend the

G-8 summit.

Kerry's view, that the 21st century will be defined by the

organized world's struggle against agents of chaos and

lawlessness, might be the beginning of a compelling vision.

The idea that America and its allies, sharing resources and

using the latest technologies, could track the movements of

terrorists, seize their bank accounts and carry out

targeted military strikes to eliminate them, seems more

optimistic and more practical than the notion that the

conventional armies of the United States will inevitably

have to punish or even invade every Islamic country that

might abet radicalism.

And yet, you can understand why Kerry has been so tentative

in advancing this idea. It's comforting to think that Al

Qaeda might be as easily marginalized as a bunch of

drug-running thugs, that an ''effective'' assault on its

bank accounts might cripple its twisted campaign against

Americans. But Americans are frightened -- an emotion that

has benefited Bush, and one that he has done little to

dissuade -- and many of them perceive a far more

existential threat to their lives than the one Kerry

describes. In this climate, Kerry's rather dry recitations

about money-laundering laws and intelligence-sharing

agreements can sound oddly discordant. We are living at a

time that feels historically consequential, where people

seem to expect -- and perhaps deserve -- a theory of the

world that matches the scope of their insecurity.

Theoretically, Kerry could still find a way to wrap his

ideas into some bold and cohesive construct for the next

half-century -- a Kerry Doctrine, perhaps, or a campaign

against chaos, rather than a
war on terror -- that people

will understand and relate to. But he has always been a man

who prides himself on appreciating the subtleties of public

policy, and everything in his experience has conditioned

him to avoid unsubtle constructs and grand designs. His

aversion to Big Think has resulted in one of the campaign's

oddities: it is Bush, the man vilified by liberals as

intellectually vapid, who has emerged as the de facto

visionary in the campaign, trying to impose some long-term

thematic order on a dangerous and disorderly world, while

Kerry carves the globe into a series of discrete problems

with specific solutions.

When Kerry first told me that Sept. 11 had not changed him,

I was surprised. I assumed everyone in America -- and

certainly in Washington -- had been changed by that day. I

assumed he was being overly cautious, afraid of providing

his opponents with yet another cheap opportunity to call

him a flip-flopper. What I came to understand was that, in

fact, the attacks really had not changed the way Kerry

viewed or talked about terrorism -- which is exactly why he

has come across, to some voters, as less of a leader than

he could be. He may well have understood the threat from Al

Qaeda long before the rest of us. And he may well be right,

despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says

that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be

more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty

vision might have seemed more satisfying -- and would have

been easier to talk about in a political campaign -- in a

world where the twin towers still stood.





Matt Bai, a contributing writer, is covering the

presidential campaign for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/magazine/10KERRY.html?ex=1098438583&ei=1&en=327366b4847f6675



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