Warring visions for Iraq

For US voters, the good news is that President George W. Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry are finally engaging in a concerted argument about what the nation's next steps in Iraq should be.

The bad news is that their descriptions of Iraq's current situation are so far apart they sound as if they're talking about a different country.

In any case, debating whether the US needs to send more troops, or ask for more NATO involvement, may be somewhat beside the point. It's true that the next president, whoever it is, will have important choices to make in regards to US policy. But in Iraq the US may now simply be riding a tiger. The most important American actions to come may be those taken in response to events which have yet to occur.

"There is a real question whether the course of events there can be influenced by anything the US does," says Ivo Daalder, senior fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

With election day now less than six weeks away, it seems increasingly likely that Iraq, and the general issue of terrorism and security, will be the hinge on which the vote swings.

Senator Kerry will undoubtedly make forays into the territory of domestic issues, particularly healthcare and jobs. But with his pointed speech Monday, in which he judged Mr. Bush's policies harshly, Kerry served notice that he will try and reframe the Iraq debate on his own terms.

President Bush has "misled, miscalculated, and mismanaged" virtually everything about the conflict in Iraq, Kerry charged.

Bush himself, on the other hand, continued with his "steady as she goes" message in his speech to the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

"Today, the Iraqi people are the path to democracy and freedom," Bush said.

To some extent Senator Kerry has already tried, without notable success, to attract more voters with comprehensive Iraq critiques. The difference this week is that he used notably stronger language, and all but said that if he had been in charge in 2003 he would not have invaded Iraq when Bush did.

In addition, Kerry combined criticism of Bush's past actions with his own prescriptions for the future. As he has previously, Kerry said that Bush should immediately take steps to repair alliances, accelerate the creation of Iraqi security forces, move faster on reconstruction, and ensure elections.

But for Kerry the problem here is that to some extent these are all things that the Bush administration is trying to do.

For instance, it's possible that NATO allies would be amenable to sending troops to Iraq in support of a President Kerry, but at this point, given the opposition of their own publics, that still looks unlikely. And President Bush has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to cobble together a UN security force to guard the election infrastructure for Iraq's scheduled January vote.

Furthermore, the administration is already trying to accelerate the creation of Iraqi security forces - witness this week's proposal to Congress to switch $3 billion from reconstruction to security programs.

Kerry has provided some details about how he might achieve his broad goals. He proposes to open up redevelopment of Iraq's oil industry to other nations, for example, as a way of winning more security and reconstruction aid.

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