October 4, 2004, U.S. Edition

How To Pick a War President
Time to debate: This is the first foreign-policy election in a quarter century. Voters are scared; they want to know who will be the best commander in chief. Here's what to look for
By Fareed Zakaria

Forty-four years ago, on Sept. 26, 1960, the first presidential debate in American history was held in Chicago. Between 60 million and 70 million Americans watched Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy discuss the most contentious issues of the day. At the end of the evening, people declared Kennedy the clear winner. The conventional wisdom remains that Kennedy triumphed because he looked better on television; Nixon was tired and had not worn makeup. But if you read the transcript of the debate, Kennedy still comes off as more energetic, disciplined and effective than Nixon. Kennedy framed the terms of discussion, and repeatedly played up his central themes. By contrast, Nixon seemed reactive and defensive. When asked to respond to Kennedy's first answer, Nixon said, "I have no comment."

A presidential debate is the one parliamentary ritual in America's presidential campaign. It is the only time that the candidates stand face to face, answer questions and respond to each other. This year, with a narrowly divided citizenry, the polls bouncing around and just over a month to Election Day, the debates are expected to attract a particularly large audience. They should. It is a crucial moment for the United States, and the candidates need to explain and defend their views to the voters.

In Miami this week, the topic is foreign policy. This is fitting. Though there are crucial issues at stake about the economy, health care and the environment, war and diplomacy dominate the news, day after day, bomb after bomb; 2004 is the first foreign-policy election in the United States in a quarter century. In fact, in some ways, this year parallels 1960. Then, too, foreign affairs were at the top of the agenda. Of the four Nixon-Kennedy debates, three were exclusively devoted to foreign policy. Americans were scared—those were the years of the civil-defense drills with schoolchildren ducking under their desks. And fear is what gets Americans interested in the world. The United States was in an intense geopolitical struggle, and voters wanted to understand how the two candidates would lead. The election hinged on the question of leadership in war. So it does today.

Many Democrats believe that if John Kerry spends too much time talking about foreign policy, he is playing on Bush's turf. But that misunderstands the moment. If Kerry does not demonstrate his capabilities as a wartime president, he will cede the election to Bush. After all, take Iraq away and you have an incumbent president with an economy growing at more than 3 percent, which is a formula for re-election. Over the past year Bush's approval ratings have been hammered because of his handling of war, not health care. Iraq is the main event of this campaign, and whoever handles this issue best will win.

The candidates should face three tests that help reveal their strengths and weaknesses as leaders in war. First, how do they define this conflict? Second, how do they define success? Finally, how do they think victory can be achieved? As we watch the debate this week, we should bear these questions in mind, listen for answers and judge the candidates accordingly.

The first test is potentially the most important, because all else follows from it. What kind of conflict are we in? The Bush administration has striven to make the case that we are in a war much like World War II. Both the president and Vice President Cheney have repeatedly implied this. Cheney has often made specific analogies to it. The president's supporters explain that in a life-and-death struggle with a mortal foe, you have to fight anywhere and everywhere. Things don't always go well. Churchill and Roosevelt made many mistakes during the second world war. But they kept pressing forward. Looking back today, who knows if the North African invasion was worthwhile? Sometimes you take the wrong hill. That's war.

It's a powerful interpretation because, if accepted, it gives the administration a virtual carte blanche. All errors are forgiven, all blunders swept aside, all excesses dwarfed by the overarching conflict. Iraq may have been badly handled, but it is just one front in a many-front war. Abu Ghraib may have been appalling, but consider the pressures. During World War II, the United States interned Japanese-American civilians. It wasn't right, but it was war.

An alternative interpretation would hold that we are not in a classic war with a powerful and identifiable country. Rather, this new war is really much more like the cold war. It has a military dimension, to be sure, but in large part it's a political, economic and social struggle for hearts and minds. In such a conflict, as in the cold war, the question of where and how military force is used is crucial. Its battlefield successes always have to be balanced against political effects. An understanding of culture and nationalism becomes key because the goal is more complex than simple military victory. It is creating like-minded societies. Thus, if you are not sophisticated in your application of power, you can find yourself in a situation like Vietnam where you win every battle but lose the war.

One can argue that this is precisely the situation in Iraq, where America could easily crush the insurgency but at a political price that would make victory utterly counterproductive. And beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, the conflict becomes even more complex and less military. In Iran and North Korea, the military option is more bluster than fact. And how does one defuse militant extremism in, say, Indonesia, Morocco and Egypt? By working with those governments to find terrorists, and with those societies to help modernize them. And if this is the bulk of the task going forward, does it really resemble a war?

The second challenge for the candidates is to explain what would constitute success. Here Bush has been clear. Success requires victory in Iraq, which is "the central front in the war on terror." Bush seeks to establish democracy in Iraq as a way of breaking the tyrannical status quo in the Middle East that has bred repression and terror. Kerry has argued that the war in Iraq was justifiable but disastrously botched. More recently he's said that it has been a distraction from the war on terror. Though both are defensible positions, Kerry will have to choose one of them.

Bush's position on Iraq seems genuinely held. He did not plan the intervention for political benefit. But it does have a powerful dividend. It places him in the role of rooting for America's success in a great venture. He praises American soldiers for building Iraqi schools and holding town-hall meetings. He intends that America help build a free Iraq. It is a remarkably successful rhetorical approach‹despite what is actually happening in Iraq‹because Bush is telling Americans what they believe about their country. He is telling them what they want to think about the mission in Iraq. He is rooting for America to triumph against the odds.

For Kerry to succeed, he must find a way to root for American success as well. He should also ceaselessly praise the nation-building efforts of American soldiers in Iraq, which are in fact quite heroic. He was mistaken in reacting to Prime Minister Allawi's speech to Congress by belittling him. Instead he should have expressed solidarity with Allawi's goals. "Who among us does not wish that Prime Minister Allawi's dream of democracy in Iraq will be fulfilled?" he might have said, adding, "But the reality is that we are moving away from that dream every day, thanks to the monumental blunders of the Bush administration." While frontally criticizing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, John Kennedy always took pains not to criticize the country. "I don't believe there's anything this country can't do," he said after laying out all the things it wasn't doing.

Bush's central problem is with the third factor: the path to success. His goals are clear and effectively stated. But he appears unaware of the situation on the ground in Iraq. He says he is "pleased with the progress" so far and speaks of a "handful of terrorists" disrupting democracy in Iraq. Contrast this picture with the one painted two weeks ago by a team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a hawkish think tank, that conducted an extensive survey of Iraq. They concluded that in every dimension, from security to reconstruction to economics, Iraq was slipping backward. This is also the view of the CIA and almost all journalists in Iraq. Bush risks coming across not as visionary but as someone disconnected from reality.

Great wartime leaders know that they owe their public bad news as well as good. Such honesty maintains a leader's credibility and reassures the public that it is not being manipulated. Churchill and Roosevelt routinely acknowledged the difficult times during World War II. Describing the disaster of Dunkirk, when British troops fled France, abandoning most of their equipment, Churchill said, "Wars are not won by evacuations."

Bush's refusal to acknowledge mistakes is not simply an image problem. The administration made its gravest mistakes in Iraq because it did not want to accept that the reality on the ground was different from its theories. It refused to recognize the need for a larger force, which was obvious within days of the fall of Baghdad and the collapse of order in Iraq. ("Freedom is messy," Donald Rumsfeld explained, dismissing the matter.) It did not want to see that a nakedly American occupation was generating anti-Americanism. It did not want to accept that its plans were not working.

John Kerry faces two challenges on this front. The first is to tie the failures of the Iraq war to Bush and his leadership traits. He will need to demonstrate that Bush's confidence does not equal competence. His second challenge is to provide a sense of his own plans and display his own competence on these issues. This has not always been necessary for presidential challengers. During the Korean War, Eisenhower could campaign on ending the conflict by saying in effect, "Trust me. I will go to Korea and figure out what to do." But Ike had directed the invasion of Europe, the largest and most successful military operation in the history of humankind. He had credibility on that subject that no one else will ever have. Bush and Kerry need to be more specific.

Democratic societies have always debated war leadership vigorously, even in the middle of hostilities. The first democracy, Athens, deposed and fined its elected leader, Pericles, as it grew frustrated with his leadership in the Peloponnesian War. (Being a good politician, Pericles quickly made a comeback.) In the midst of the Civil War, George McClellan ran on a platform that totally repudiated the war. (Lincoln won in a landslide.) Americans changed their president during both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. So a feisty debate during a war is not to be feared. War is not a reason to suspend democracy. In fact, it is when democracy is at its most consequential and vibrant.