Foreign policy is central in 2008 presidential races

Parties' candidates are all talking about ending the Iraq war or fighting terrorism -- but Americans want answers to both.

By Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writer

July 29, 2007

WASHINGTON — It's easy to tell the difference between the two parties on foreign policy in this presidential campaign. The Democrats all want to talk about getting out of Iraq, but not so much about Al Qaeda or terrorism. The Republicans all want to talk about terrorism, but not so much about Iraq.

Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties' worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

The problem each party faces, polls show, is that most Americans want answers to both questions, not just one or the other.

"Foreign policy is playing a role in this campaign unlike any election since the Cold War," said Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official who heads a new centrist think tank in Washington, the Center for New American Security. "The debate so far has made the two parties' positions appear polarized, more than they need to be…. The election may well be decided on foreign policy and national security, but it's all about just two issues: Iraq and the war on terror."

Not every foreign policy issue is as polarizing as Iraq. There are even signs of potential bipartisan consensus on other issues: reinvigorating traditional alliances, rebuilding a war-weary Army and Marine Corps, preventing nuclear proliferation, and maintaining aid to Africa, to name some. But Iraq is the issue many voters say will determine their choice in the presidential election; the rest have barely rated a mention in the campaign so far.

The Iraq war "may be the most partisan major foreign policy issue that we've ever had," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University. "This is a war unlike any other we have ever had, in that it is a partisan war. Even the Vietnam War, which was pretty divisive, had supporters in the Democratic Party."

Among Republicans, there's something close to unanimity: The next president's top priority will be the war on terrorism; it's too early to withdraw troops from Iraq; and the election will be decided on the issue of strength.

"I think the American people in November 2008 are going to select the person they think is strongest to defend America against Islamic terrorism," former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the front-runner among Republican candidates in most polls, said last month.

GOP candidates sometimes sound as if they are competing to show who is most unrelenting.

"Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo; my view is that we ought to double Guantanamo," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said at a debate in May. "I want them in Guantanamo where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil." President Bush is among those who want to close the military prison for suspected terrorists.

The Republicans face a dilemma: Most of the people likely to vote in GOP primaries want to continue fighting the war in Iraq, but a big majority in the general-election electorate does not. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in June found that 67% of Republicans still approve of the way Bush is pursuing the war, compared with 26% of independents and 9% of Democrats. The responses indicated that 31% of voters in the country as a whole favored Bush's approach.

So far, the leading Republican candidates have said they are sticking with Bush. Romney has given himself a little wiggle room, saying that the Bush administration "made mistakes" and warning that there is no guarantee of success, but supporting continued funding for the war, at least for now.

"The stakes are too high ... to deny our military leaders and troops on the ground the resources and the time needed to give it an opportunity," he said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has long advocated increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq, has been more categorical. "I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war," he often says.

Giuliani has been bluntest of all. "I'm for victory," he said last week, dismissing Democrats as "the party of losers."

Experts see a certain inevitability to the tactic.

"The problem the Republicans have is that the administration's strategy [in Iraq] is a political loser — just look at John McCain — but if you're a Republican, you can't completely repudiate it," said Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at Tufts University who served as a foreign policy advisor in the 2000 Bush campaign. "So they have replaced Bush's foreign policy with 'We won't back down in the war on terror,' with being resolute."

Mandelbaum said: "The Republicans are going to try to make the war on terror a winning issue for the simple reason that they have no choice. And they may well succeed."

Among the Democratic candidates, last week brought a dust-up in which Illinois Sen. Barack Obama derided New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as "Bush-Cheney lite" after Clinton called Obama "irresponsible and frankly naive."

But there's also a rough consensus: Combating terrorism is important, but the war in Iraq is weakening the United States and the next president should exert more diplomacy and less military muscle.

"The current security policy — with its excessive reliance on unilateral force, its rejection of international agreements of all kinds, and its preference for policy-making based on ideology, not evidence — has to change," Clinton, the party's front-runner, said in a speech last month.

Still, the Democrats have arrayed themselves on a clear foreign policy spectrum, with Clinton, who emphasizes military strength, closest to the center of the electorate; former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who has said "The war on terror is … a bumper sticker, not a plan," on the left; and Obama somewhere between the two.

Clinton talks about terrorism as a priority, and she was the last of the three leading Democratic candidates to turn against the war in Iraq.

Obama also talks about terrorism, but puts his emphasis more strongly on diplomacy — leading to his statement in last week's debate that he was willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea or Cuba without preconditions. That was the position Clinton called "naive."

Despite such disagreements, though, Clinton and Obama both voted this month in favor of a measure to force Bush to remove combat troops from Iraq by April. (The measure was blocked.)

"They're not all that far apart," said Stephen Bosworth, a former State Department official who is now dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts.

Edwards, by contrast, has staked out distinct positions on both Iraq and terrorism. He has called for an immediate withdrawal of at least 40,000 troops from Iraq, and a complete withdrawal within a year. And he has said it is time to abandon the idea of a "war on terror."

"The worst thing about the global-war-on-terror approach is that it has backfired — our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism has grown," he said in a May speech.

He continued: "By framing this as a 'war,' we have walked right into the trap that terrorists have set — that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war against Islam."

According to Mandelbaum, "Whichever Democrat wins the nomination is going to have to move a little bit toward the center in the general-election campaign."

Clinton will have "the least distance to move," he said.

"She appears to be running a general-election campaign already."

The nuances of Clinton's position on Iraq do not appear to have weakened her appeal to antiwar liberals by much. The Times/Bloomberg poll found her leading among liberals with 51%, compared with 27% for Obama and 18% for Edwards.

How these crosscurrents play out in the general-election campaign next year depends largely on a factor none of the candidates can control: the state of affairs in Iraq.

Democrats are likely to continue blaming Republicans for the costs of the war, no matter what. But if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has begun, Republicans may be tempted to declare the war resolved and try to change the subject to terrorism.

"There is one issue on which the Republicans still enjoy an advantage, and that is the larger war on terrorism," Campbell said. Republican candidates have accused Democrats of being weak on defense "since 1948," he said.

"Despite Bush's unpopularity, I don't think the Democrats have this walking away," said Terry L. Deibel, a foreign policy scholar at the Defense Department's National War College. "If a withdrawal begins in Iraq by next summer, it's possible that things could go south very dramatically.

"Depending on what the pictures on the TV screen are next October, it might not be too comfortable for Democrats."

Underneath today's bitter debate, paradoxically, there are some points of agreement between the two parties.

"Right now we're in the campaign season, and that tends to produce polarization," said Campbell. "Once we get past the election and reach the governing phase, I believe there will be substantial consensus around many issues including our alliances, the need for a strong military, and importance of backing up diplomacy with military force."

For example, he noted, most of the candidates, Democrats as well as Republicans, have called for increasing the Army and Marines by 92,000 or more people.

One other point of consensus: No candidate has taken up Bush's challenge to spread democracy across the Muslim world as a central goal for U.S. foreign policy.

"The Bush experiment is over, for now at least," said Mandelbaum. "It's been buried in the sands of Iraq."