Of course, practically no one was listening. It was like Nero offering a brilliant water-and-sewage plan for Rome in the midst of the fire. The Bush Iraq policy lay shattered in tiny pieces; the President seemed crestfallen in his public appearances. Indeed, Kerry's message discipline—broken by occasional, measured responses to reporters' questions about the war—almost seemed a clever way to avoid the issue. His audiences waited in vain for a passionate response to the Iraq debacle.
At a town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., the tension was broken by a young Army reservist named Charity Thompson, recently returned from Iraq, who said she was having trouble getting medical care from the Veterans Administration. Her story, and her implicit anger about the war, was greeted with a vehement standing ovation. Kerry responded to the health-care point but stayed clear of the war. Later Thompson told me, "I wanted to hear what he had to say about Iraq. I despise this war, and 99.9% of the people I served with feel the same way. We should bring our troops home now. I'd really like to know what Kerry thinks about that."
The answer Thompson eventually receives will be the most important decision Kerry makes in this campaign, but it won't be coming soon—and that is very much by design. In recent months, Kerry's inadequacies have been picked apart by preying pundits, including me. And yes, it would be nice if he were more eloquent, emotive, funny and, above all, courageous. But if nothing else, Kerry has a sophisticated sense of political timing; he knows how to wait until people are paying attention. "I've been with him through six campaigns, and he always scares you in the beginning," a Kerry stalwart told me last week. "But he's always right there in October."
Kerry's aides insist that the Senator's Iraq reticence is merely an act of patriotic high-mindedness reflecting a desire to show support for the troops and to not "politicize" the issue. Oh, please. There are at least three strategic reasons for saying as little as possible right now. The first is Politics 101: There is nothing Kerry can say about Iraq that would have greater emotional impact than the photos from Abu Ghraib or that would point out the contradictions of Bush policy more vividly than the sight of a Baathist general taking control of Fallujah from nonvictorious American Marines. The second reason is that Kerry has been pretty consistent about Iraq, and there is no need to change his basic formulation—which is to seek help from the U.N. and the international community—especially since the President is moving willy-nilly to adopt it. Which leads to the third reason: The Bush policy on Iraq seems to be changing drastically, and cautious Kerry may be waiting to see where it stands come Labor Day before he revises his response to it.
The Fallujah capitulation may be key. Let's say that U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi successfully names a transition government. Let's say the U.N. Security Council ratifies that government. The first priority of the new government could be to build legitimacy with the Iraqi people by separating itself from the U.S. The most logical way to do that would be to extend the Fallujah principle to the entire country: ask the American military to stand down and turn security over to local militias—Baathists in the Sunni triangle, the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north, the Shi'ite Badr Brigade in the south. This would be dreadful long-term policy, an open invitation to civil war. But would the Bush Administration oppose it? Possibly not, on recent evidence, especially if it produced the appearance of calm by November (as it already has in Fallujah). Several Kerry aides said they thought it was possible that some American troops would be coming home this fall.
If so, then what does Kerry say about Iraq? Sooner or later, he will have to tell us whether he thinks the war was worth it. He will have to say whether he believes America has a responsibility to restore stability and rebuild Iraq. He will either have to stick with his U.N. plan and hope the international community will support the new Iraqi government with a major peacekeeping effort, or support the premature withdrawal of American troops, if that is what Bush decides to do. Ultimately, and this is the hardest decision of all, he will have to decide whether to tell Charity Thompson something she doesn't want to hear.