Offensive on Kerry's war record backfires

AMERICA/Conor O'Clery : While the real war was being fought in Iraq this week, a phoney war has been raging over John Kerry'…

AMERICA/Conor O'Clery: While the real war was being fought in Iraq this week, a phoney war has been raging over John Kerry's war record. It started on Sunday when Karen Hughes, President Bush's close political adviser, told CNN she was "troubled" that the Democratic challenger only "pretended" to throw his medals away at an antiwar protest in 1971.

It was very revealing about his character, she said. On April 23rd, 1971, Kerry took part with 800 Vietnam vets in tossing combat decorations across a barrier at the Capitol Building in Washington. He threw only his ribbons and a couple of medals belonging to absent comrades.

Whether Kerry subsequently gave the impression to fellow antiwar activists that he chucked away his own medals (which are today in a desk drawer in his Boston study) is as clear as whether George Bush fulfilled his National Guard duty in Texas and Alabama.

Kerry has always avoided criticising Bush over avoiding Vietnam combat, especially as the Massachusetts senator gave Bill Clinton a pass ("We do not need to divide America over who served and how," he said when Clinton was running for president), but with Bush's surrogates hammering on the medals issue he lost his cool.

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"I'm not going to stand for it," he said. "This president can't even prove he actually showed up for duty in the National Guard."

Forced to appear several times on network news to defend his actions 33 years ago, a fuming Kerry was heard muttering into a live microphone about an aggressive ABC interviewer: "God, they're doing the work of the Republican National Committee." The up-front work of the Republican National Committee was evident all week long in a $10 million TV ad blitz attacking Kerry on national security.

"John Kerry has repeatedly opposed weapons vital to winning the war on terror," a voice-over said, listing "Bradley fighting vehicles, patriot missiles and body armour", items plucked from the $87 billion bill for Iraq and Afghanistan which Kerry opposed in the Senate because Bush refused to take tax benefits from the wealthy to help pay for it.

The Republican smearing of Kerry, enthusiastically taken up by Democrat-bashing talk show hosts and sneering xenophobic columnists who like to rubbish him as the "first French President" (Kerry is fluent in French), is designed, according to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, to erase his image as a Vietnam warrior and replace it with that of a "soft-on-terror lawmaker".

The campaign backfired, however, when Kerry's war wounds and service records were challenged. Seizing on a comment by a former Vietnam officer, Grant Hibbard, who questioned the severity of a shrapnel wound that led to Kerry's first Purple Heart, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, called on Kerry to release all his military records from 1966 to 1978. After delaying for some days, adding to the perception he had something to hide, Kerry released the records.

They showed that Hibbard had highly praised the young naval officer's initiative, co-operation and bearing. Other superiors described him as "a top notch officer in every measurable trait" and as "one of the finest young officers I have ever met". A lieutenant commander wrote: "In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action" Kerry was "unsurpassed".

In Congress Kerry's antiwar protests became the issue. Republican House member John Kline accused Kerry of "aiding and abetting the enemy", and Congressman Sam Johnson called him "Hanoi John". Such tactics are familiar to Democrat Max Cleland who lost three limbs in Vietnam and was hounded out of the Senate in 2002 for being weak on defence, and to Republican senator John McCain who was smeared as the father of an illegitimate black child (he has an adopted Bangladeshi daughter) when surging against George Bush in the 2000 campaign.

McCain tried to call a halt to his party's siege of Kerry, asking the Senate: "At least could we declare that the Vietnam War is over and have a ceasefire and agree that both candidates, the president of the United States and Senator Kerry, served honourably, end of story?"

Vice President Dick Cheney also overreached himself this week in attacking Kerry, at least in the opinion of his host for a major speech on Monday.

Fletcher Lamkin, president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, invited Cheney to deliver a "major foreign policy address" in the college where Winston Churchill warned in 1946 of an Iron Curtain descending across Europe.

The vice president, however, devoted 19 paragraphs to belittling Kerry on national security. "Surprised and disappointed" at getting a "stump speech", Lamkin responded by inviting Kerry to make his own pitch in the college yesterday. With Cheney now in the lead role of bashing the Democratic candidate, Kerry surrogates have begun to counter attack.

Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey called Cheney the Bush administration's "lead chickenhawk", a reference to his deferments during the Vietnam war. Cheney could become a liability to the Republican campaign. He has made the president look weak by the joint appearance at the 9/11 commission and he makes it hard for Bush to argue that his administration stands for compassionate conservatism.

Cheney - who voted for huge defence cuts himself in days past - has also been hammered in the media for refusing to disclose details of his secretive energy committee. This has been challenged in the Supreme Court where his friend, Judge Antonin Scalia, has declined to recuse himself after it became public that he took a trip with Cheney on Air Force 2 to go duck hunting. Cheney's public support has declined to 39 per cent from 56 per cent three years ago, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. In a CBS/New York Times poll, only one in four had a favourable opinion of Cheney.

Bono is getting in on the political ad wars. Republican Congressman Jim Nussle, chair of the House Budget Committee, found himself the target of radio ads in his Iowa district after his budget cut AIDS relief. They accused him of standing in the way of a plan agreed by Mr Bush and Congress to deal with the AIDS crisis. The ads were paid for by the advocacy organisation DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), founded by the U2 singer. Nussle also wants to cut defence spending, which - at a stretch - puts him in Dick Cheney's sights too, if he ever turns Democrat.