19960: Marassa: Kerry publicly backs Aristide. New York tImes (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: DeSprit Marassa <lwasauvaj@hotmail.com>

[Marassa interject: This was republican bait for Democracts. Democracts take
bait. oops. ]

In Sweeping Critique, Kerry Condemns Bush for Failing to Back Aristide
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: March 7, 2004


OUSTON, March 6 — Had he been sitting in the Oval Office last weekend as
rebel forces were threatening to enter Port-au-Prince, Senator John Kerry
says, he would have sent an international force to protect Haiti's widely
disliked elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period," Mr. Kerry
said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush, who talks of
supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any aid and then helped
spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the United States could not
protect him.

"Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong," Mr. Kerry
said. But Washington "had understandings in the region about the right of a
democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think
it's a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it's shortsighted."

Mr. Kerry's critique on Haiti, which Bush campaign aides dismissed as
political, was emblematic of how he is already using foreign policy and
national security issues in his contest with the president.

In his first in-depth interview on foreign affairs since effectively winning
the Democratic nomination, Mr. Kerry hop-scotched around the world in the
course of an hour. He took issue with Mr. Bush's judgment beyond their
well-aired differences on Iraq, questioning his handling of North Korea, the
Mideast peace process and the spread of nuclear weapons and arguing that he
would rewrite the Bush strategy that makes pre-emption a declared, central
tenet of American policy.

Mr. Kerry is trying a bit of election-season pre-emption of his own,
attempting to short-circuit the White House argument that he is too much of
a straddler, too indecisive and too captivated by the nuances of foreign
policy to defend American interests.

"People will know I'm tough and I'm prepared to do what is necessary to
defend the United States of America, and that includes the unilateral
deployment of troops if necessary," said Mr. Kerry, who has rarely used the
word "unilateral" in the campaign except to describe how Mr. Bush has
alienated allies. "But my standard is very different from George Bush's."

But so far, Mr. Kerry has not described that standard in detail. In the
interview on his plane, Mr. Kerry said he was reluctant to define how he
would act in specific situations — particularly in murky cases like Pakistan
— because conditions could change by next year.

Yet, signaling how he plans to use the questionable intelligence about Iraq
to chip away Mr. Bush's credibility, he added that if he committed troops to
battle, he would do it with "full disclosure and full vetting of the
intelligence to the American people."

But the core of Mr. Kerry's argument in the interview was that divisions
within Mr. Bush's foreign policy team have frozen the art of preventative
diplomacy and kept Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from doing his job.

"I think simply Powell, who I know, like and admire, has been never
permitted to be fully a secretary of state in the way that I envision the
secretary of state," he said, describing how he believes that Mr. Powell has
been regularly undercut by the administration's more hawkish members, led by
Vice President Dick Cheney. "I think Powell — I'm not sure they didn't lock
the keys to the airplane up sometimes."

Mr. Kerry warms to these topics in a way he never quite seems to do when
talking about his multistep plans to reform health care or roll back parts
of Mr. Bush's tax cuts.

Years on the Senate Foreign Relations committee have given him a fluidity in
talking about the world's hot spots. On Friday he spoke of his long
tutorials about China with Lee Kwan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern
Singapore and now its senior minister. He slipped in a reference to his
conversations with world leaders at the annual World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, an exclusive event where he used to be a regular
attendee.

He said he might take a foreign trip during the campaign — he would not say
where — an event that would emphasize a diplomatic style distinct from Mr.
Bush's.

Yet some members of his growing foreign policy team — some days it seems as
if every former Clinton administration aide is now scrambling to climb
aboard, forgetting their brief dalliances with Mr. Kerry's former primary
rivals — worry that such talk could backfire on the campaign trail. Mr.
Kerry, they concede, still has a hard time mustering the clear, declarative
sentences and bedrock precepts that have become Mr. Bush's trademark.

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