The American people have a right to hear the answer to a simple question: How are we going to win this war on terror? What is our strategy for eliminating the terrorists, discrediting their cause and smashing their forces so that America and our allies can actually be safer?
John Kerry has a comprehensive plan to wage a relentless, single-minded war to capture or kill the terrorists, crush their movement, free the world from fear. He will destroy the terrorist networks, take strong action to prevent nuclear terrorism, cut off terrorism financing, protect the homeland, deny terror safe havens and new recruits, support democracies in the Arab and Muslim world, and restore our alliances to combat terrorists across the globe.
Across the board, Kerry would take a more activist approach. He would do so in a way that each element also acts as a force multiplier. The first element of Kerry’s plan is to transform our military — to increase the depth and breadth of our counterterror capabilities and to relieve the burden on our overextended forces.
Kerry will double Army Special Forces and increase other Special Operations Forces. He will expand our army by 40,000 troops so we have more soldiers to fight the war on terror and relieve our overstretched army and military. And as part of this expansion, he will increase specific post-conflict capabilities — precisely the forces we should have had ready for a stabilization phase in Iraq — and the type of forces we must now build in order to increase the efficacy of our military response.
On intelligence, the agenda is clear: The 9/11 Commission has offered a broad range of steps that must be taken. Kerry will implement the commission recommendations and support them immediately. He will create a national intelligence director to lead the reform of our intelligence agencies and double our clandestine agents overseas. Kerry will transform intelligence services to deal with today’s threats, ensuring that our intelligence services have sufficient personnel with the skills, languages, training, and orientation needed to meet today’s and tomorrow’s threats — terrorism, particularly, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons terrorism.
Kerry will pursue an aggressive strategy to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. Fewer nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union were secured in the two years after Sept. 11 than in the two years before. The Bush administration has been on the sidelines while nuclear dangers in Iran and North Korea have mounted.
Kerry’s plan will secure all nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union within four years. At the current pace, it would take thirteen. Kerry will seek a verifiable global ban on the production of materials for nuclear weapons. He will get tough with Iran, about which I’ll speak more in a moment. And work with our allies to restart talks with North Korea and talk directly to North Korea. Kerry will impose sanctions against any nation and any bank that launders money and he has a plan to make us independent of Middle East oil, ensuring fuel-efficient cars and SUVs of the future are built here in America.
Investing in homegrown renewable fuels, our farmers can grow the crops. Our people can run the factories that turn it into oil and invest in a variety of fuel resources. Homeland security must also be a priority, with real resources and stronger safeguards against attack. Across the board, significant changes are required from getting resources to our cities and first responders, to expediting a system to safeguard our chemical and nuclear plants and mass transit systems. Our port security programs must be significantly expanded and our public health system needs to be strengthened to defend against bioterrorism.
The question is: How do we change course? What should be the shape of a long-term strategy to change the political equation in the Arab and Muslim world? How do we change perceptions of our country, which has lost an enormous amount of respect around the world? And how do we launch a serious effort to use our influence, our experience, and our strength as a pluralist nation to support reformers?
The strategy cannot be monolithic, it requires a differentiated approach based on an effective assessment in each country. By tailoring our approach, we are maximizing the impact of our efforts in support of efforts to defeat the abject poverty and diseases that destroy lives and create failed states, and working with our allies to make sure children go to schools, good schools, not schools that teach hate.
A new approach means standing up to repressive governments, and it means a strategy for reform backed by an effort to train a new generation of American scholars, diplomats, military officers, and democracy builders so we can reach out effectively to Arabs and Muslims.
And a new approach means bringing allies on board. This cannot and should not be work that we do alone. To work together means serious high-level planning and coordination, working effectively to bring European allies to the effort and to coordinate activities with governments and nongovernmental entities interested in the Arab and Muslim world.
Iraq has become a major distraction from this global war on terrorism. It has now become a convenient arena for jihad, which has helped Al-Qaeda to recover from the setback it suffered as a result of the war in Afghanistan. The US presence in Iraq now demands more and more assets that might have been otherwise deployed against various dimensions of the global terrorist threat.”
We can still avoid a failure in Iraq. Kerry has outlined a clear plan with four elements. Secure promised international support, get serious about training Iraqi security forces and really get it underway. Carry out a reconstruction plan that brings benefits to the Iraqi people. And finally, take the essential steps to hold promised elections next year. Allies should be approached with requests to fill specific roles: The training of Iraqi forces, in-country and outside, securing Iraq’s borders, providing the needed protection force for the UN election staff, and more.
Today, after the invasion of Iraq, which some in this administration thought would lead to democratic change in Iran, hard-liners are firmly in control of the Majlis, having crushed the reform movement. Iran has steadily made progress on its nuclear program as well. It is currently, openly defying the IAEA resolution by continuing with uranium enrichment activities.
If it is left unchecked, Iran is poised to make important technological advances that will bring it even closer to the point where it can enrich enough uranium for several nuclear weapons.
Iran’s support for terrorists also continues unabated. It is currently listed by the State Department as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. It has senior Al-Qaeda members supposedly in custody, and Rumsfeld recently said that the Iranians are managing them, “in a way that they hope might benefit them.” And support for Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad is as strong as ever.
While these developments have been underway, the Bush administration has had no Iran policy because of the deep divisions that exist between the State Department on the one hand and the Defense Department and the Vice President’s Office on the other. That division continues right up until this very moment.
That is why we have seen no coherence in the administration’s approach. President Bush put Iran in the Axis of Evil, but his administration continued its discussions with Iranian officials for several months in Europe. Officials in the Defense Department have pushed for a regime change in Iran, while State Department officials have testified that regime change is not American policy. The administration says it does not want to talk to Iran, but Iraqi officials and others say that one of the main purposes of the meeting of Iraq’s neighbors in the G-8 in Cairo is to get the US and Iran in the same room.
The president, to this day, has not put his foot down and demanded a coherent unified policy in his administration. Instead, he has let our policy drift even as Iran enters closer to nuclear weapons capability.
As a result, the EU-3, France, Germany, and Great Britain stepped into the breach and engaged the Iranians last October. The Iranians, as you all know, have now reneged on their agreement to suspend uranium enrichment-related activity. And in the latest confusion, just over the last couple of days, G-8 political directors met in Washington and, reportedly, our European allies put forward their ideas for a carrot and stick policy.
Time is truly running out. So, here’s what John Kerry would do. As we’ve said, a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. We should sit down with our G-8 partners, beginning with our European allies, and forge a united front. If Iran does not accept the offer of a guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel, as long as spent fuel is removed in exchange for a verifiable end to Iran’s development of a full nuclear fuel cycle, we would lead our partners in seeking tough sanctions and penalties, including through action by the UN Security Council.
— Wendy Sherman is senior foreign policy adviser to the John-Kerry-John Edwards campaign.
