Kerry needs stronger stance on Iraq- It’s the war, stupid.

Kerry needs stronger stance on Iraq

It’s the war, stupid. And if John Kerry is to win the presidential election, he is going to have to take a much more aggressive stance against it.

The conventional wisdom is that the economy and health care have more clout as electoral issues than does Iraq. They will be powerful, but I suspect that concerns about homeland security, the global war on terrorism and Iraq are going to play a greater role on Election Day than polls and pundits predict.

President Bush obviously thinks so. He has made them central to his campaign for re-election. Meanwhile, he is trying to dress up Iraq as a military success to blunt criticism that the war was a bad idea.

Kerry, for reasons that I find unclear, has avoided making criticism of the Iraq invasion his main attack issue. Perhaps he fears being portrayed as unpatriotic as well as wishy-washy. He has yet to clearly explain his split vote on being for war powers and against war funding. Last weekend he toughened up his criticisms of Bush’s war policies a bit, but that came in answer to a question, not as a main campaign theme. The Bush camp scoffed at it for being yet another position on the war — claiming it’s Kerry’s eighth.

Whether it’s the eighth or the 18th, Kerry’s position on the Iraq war, if it is clear and consistent, will resonate with voters. It will have to be clearly oppositional and not a tangential ’’I would have done it better’’ qualifier. This is his only chance to clarify his votes and remind voters, in detail, just how inept the Bush administration has been in prosecuting this war.

No sidestepping

Until now, Kerry has settled for saying that Bush misled the nation into supporting the invasion. Bush has sidestepped that by saying everybody was misled, including him and Kerry. Kerry has said that even knowing what he knows now, he too would have voted to go to war.

Iraq is Bush’s Achilles’ heel. Kerry has been behaving as though it is also his.

Kerry has squandered several opportunities to put Bush on the defensive about his Iraq policies. Iraq is the linchpin to Bush’s policies about fighting global terrorism and protecting American interests at home and abroad.

Not only did Kerry fall into Bush’s trap by answering yes to the hypothetical question, ’’Would you have gone to war if you knew then what you know now,’’ but he has let the president get away with the lamest excuse of all for failures in Iraq by declaring they were the result of the ’’catastrophic success’’ of the initial military phase of the war.

That is like saying that jumping the gun in the 100-yard dash and running alone all the way to the finish line is a catastrophic success. No matter how fast the lone runner ran, the race isn’t over until all runners cross the finish line. The thunder run to Baghdad, impressive as it was, won’t win the gold medal. And now that all the runners are coming down the track, it is not clear that the United States is winning the real race.

Bush’s mistakes inside Iraq have been egregious and numerous. That message is not being delivered effectively. Kerry should be listing Bush’s Iraq blunders, chapter and verse, repeatedly at the top of every speech.

Failing to do so makes Kerry appear to be quibbling over process. The Iraq war is not a quibble, it is a disaster. And if the Democratic presidential contender is afraid to stand up and say so, voters are likely to see him as too weak to solve many problems.