IF I WERE ASKED to come up with the qualifications I’d look for in a candidate for high political office, the fact that he once killed someone would not be high on my list. One of the few things I don’t hold against Tony Blair is that he has never engaged in combat, unlike the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. On Sunday, after prompting from the Kerry campaign, a Vietnam veteran published a first-hand account of the incident on the Dong Cung River in February 1969 in which Kerry won a Silver Star. Specifically, he rubbished claims that the man Kerry pursued and killed was merely a teenager in a loincloth.
No, insisted William Rood, he was “a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the [Viet Cong] usually wore”. So that’s all right, then: the would-be President isn’t a wimp, but a killer. It’s hard to imagine a more offensive row for a candidate to get involved in and, even as someone who loathes President Bush, I have to say that Kerry is not an easy politician to admire. Also at the weekend, his campaign issued a TV ad complaining about attacks on his Vietnam service, ending with this message for Bush: “Get back to the issues”.
Well, who started this more-warrior-than-thou stuff? Leaving aside the temptation to e-mail some old Greenham Common slogans to Kerry’s website — “Take the toys from the boys” comes to mind — it is a bit rich of a man who struts about saluting and reporting for duty to chide his opponents for joining in this particular fight. It was Kerry who decided to flourish his war wounds like stigmata, apparently failing to realise that Bush and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who have no war records to defend, can just sit this one out.
It’s obvious that the Democrats are scared of Bush, even though he has embarked since 9/11 on a foreign policy guaranteed to make more people hate the US, especially in the Middle East. There was a moment, in the stunned aftermath of the terrorist attacks, when even some of America’s most strident critics felt that this was a time to show solidarity and sympathy with the US. Religiously motivated terrorism is a real threat, not just to right-wing US governments, but to any hope of creating a world in which most people live in modern, secular, democratic states.
Launching a war in Iraq for reasons few people believe, outside America anyway, might have been designed to dissipate that sympathy. (And if the US is going to go around intervening unilaterally all over the place, shouldn’t we all have a vote in presidential elections?) Bush’s Wild West rhetoric was a problem from the start and it’s infuriating to see Kerry respond by running the most jingoistic election campaign for decades. His fear of appearing “unpatriotic ” has embroiled him in an argument with a bunch of right-wing fruitcakes called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about what he did in South-East Asia 35 years ago.
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The group’s website complains that most Vietnam veterans kept silent for more than 30 years because “we were maligned as misfits, addicts, and baby killers”. This sweet, reasonable tone extends to their attacks on Kerry, whom they describe as “a key creator of that poisonous image”. In the organisation’s TV ad, a Vietnam veteran declares that Kerry “betrayed us in the past, how could we be loyal to him now?” This particular veteran, Ken Cordier, was quickly identified as an adviser to the Bush campaign, from which he was forced to resign after his participation was seized on as evidence that the White House was behind the attempt to discredit Kerry. Bush has now distanced himself from the veterans’ attacks, but only when the damage has been done and is showing up in opinion polls.
Kerry’s style of campaigning also confirms the impression that US elections are a boys’ own affair. I don’t imagine many Americans would be flattered by comparisons with Saudi Arabia but this presidential contest looks almost as segregated, with Kerry and his praetorian guard of Vietnam vets squaring up to Bush, Cheney and their mates in big business. American candidates bring their wives along to the party conventions, but that’s about it as far as women are concerned.
But the biggest problem posed by the Kerry campaign is that it confirms outsiders’ suspicions that American politicians are as navel-gazing as ever. On days when news bulletins are dominated by the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the ominous failure of the Arab-Israeli peace process and reports of massacres in Sudan, Kerry’s obsession with his brief period of military service is tactless, to say the least. The US needs a President who can win over foreigners, not remind us how he chased and killed one of them.
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MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR, PART II
I DON’T HAVE high hopes of Bush getting in touch with his inner woman when the Republican National Convention opens in New York at the weekend, but the city is braced for gridlock. A quarter of a million protesters are expected to take part in a rally on Sunday, but the organisers, a group called United for Peace and Justice, have been locked in battle over the route for months. The city’s Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is trying to keep the demonstrators out of Central Park, insisting that they use the West Side Highway instead.
In theory, the argument over the route is about preserving the grass on Central Park’s Great Lawn; the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, insists that the rally would render it unusable until the autumn. This is virtually a rerun of the battle between British anti-war protesters and the authorities over Hyde Park in February last year. On that occasion, the organisers won and the grass was in a pretty sorry state by the time my section of the march arrived in the late afternoon.
But what is really at stake in New York this weekend is whether the demonstrators can mobilise public opinion against the President. Some of their more enthusiastic supporters are already talking about Bush’s “1968 moment”, making comparisons with the protests that helped to turn the country against the war in South-East Asia. The novelist Norman Mailer, now aged 81, is expected to be there, reinforcing parallels with the anti-Vietnam protests. It’s make love, not war, part II: for the second time in less than 40 years, an American President is about to face the anger of his people over a faraway war.