Kerry cheered in Baghdad, decries Bush team's 'blunders'

Once criticized for war stance, he says force alone won't win
- Borzou Daragahi, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, January 6, 2005

Baghdad -- Sen. John Kerry, whose seemingly shifting positions on the U.S. war in Iraq plagued him throughout his presidential campaign, came to this war- torn capital Wednesday to see for himself whether the country was moving toward stability or deeper into chaos.

Kerry, who repeatedly charged during the presidential campaign that President Bush had botched the war effort, was greeted warmly by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad.

"I've been visiting a lot places like Des Moines and Green Bay, and it has been great," the Massachusetts Democrat said during an informal lunch meeting with a small group of reporters and representatives of nongovernmental organizations. "But we are at war, and I think you can't really make all the judgments that you need to make without digging in."

He declined to compare the growing insurgency with the one he faced in South Vietnam as a Navy gunship lieutenant more than three decades ago. But he insisted that superior firepower alone wouldn't quell the uprising disrupting Iraq.

"No insurgency is defeated by conventional military power alone," he said. "Look at the IRA," the Irish Republican Army, which fought a decadeslong guerrilla war against the British in Northern Ireland before a Catholic- Protestant power-sharing government was put in place. "It was defeated by a combination of time and political negotiation."

Kerry, who talked with U.S. intelligence officials and Iraqi officials on Wednesday, was also scheduled to meet with officials of the U.S. Embassy and with members of the interim Iraqi government, including interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and a deputy to Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite leader at the top of an electoral list favored in Iraq's Jan. 30 elections.

U.S. soldiers approached Kerry inside the restaurant of the Rashid Hotel, asking him to pose for photographs and sign T-shirts. The star-struck restaurant manager insisted on serving Kerry the restaurant's specialty, a plate of grilled chicken and lamb.

Later in the day, Kerry met with about 20 soldiers based in his home state, including reservists from the 356th Engineer Detachment and 126th Aviation Company of the Massachusetts Army National Guard at Camp Victory, where soldiers are bivouacked in luxury villas once inhabited by Saddam Hussein and his loyalists.

"They all joked about how living conditions had changed since Sen. Kerry was in Vietnam," said David Wade, the senator's communications director.

Kerry was scheduled to fly on a C-130 military transport plane today to visit troops in Fallujah and Mosul.

The senator said he was more interested in asking questions of soldiers, U.S. officials, Iraqis and even the journalists themselves instead of rehashing the political battles of the past campaign season.

But in several instances, Kerry attacked what he called the "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders" of the Bush administration. The mistakes, he said, included former U.S. occupation leader Paul Bremer's decisions to disband the Iraqi army and purge the government of former members of Hussein's Baath Party. Both moves are widely believed to have fueled the largely Sunni insurgency.

"What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning," he said. "And the job has been made enormously harder."

He added, however, that it was time to move forward.

"Mistakes have been made," he said. "Now, it's a different time and different set of judgments that have to be made. I'm here to make judgments about what moves are available to us."

Kerry is visiting Iraq as part of a Middle East tour that also includes meetings with leaders in Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He said success in Iraq was vital as part of the struggle for wider change in the Middle East.

"The stakes are very important, very high, and not just for Iraq," he said. "You have another election in the West Bank, a set of challenges to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the region that are quite daunting."

Kerry cheered in Baghdad, decries Bush team's 'blunders' / Once criticized for war stance, he says force alone won't win