United States Senator John Kerry criticised President George Bush for failing to back Haiti’s elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, saying the administration’s policy was ”shortsighted” and sent ”a terrible message” to the region and democracies, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, told the newspaper that he would have sent an international force to protect Aristide as rebel forces were threatening to enter the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.
”I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period,” Kerry said, in a wide-ranging interview on foreign policy issues conducted on Friday with Times reporters.
Kerry told the newspaper that it was wrong for the Bush administration to withhold any aid from Aristide, and then help spirit him into exile after saying the United States could not protect him from the rebels.
”Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong,” Kerry said in the Times interview. But Washington ”had understandings in the region about the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think it’s a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it’s shortsighted.”
A Bush campaign spokesperson, Steve Schmidt, told the newspaper that Kerry was playing ”politics” in his critique of the administration’s Haiti policy. Bush administration officials say that Aristide’s own actions brought about Haiti’s crisis, and the United States decided not to prop him up because he had lost legitimacy. They say the administration’s policy not only helped save the lives of Aristide and his family, but those of many Haitians.
In the Times interview, Kerry said that divisions within the administration’s foreign policy team had undermined efforts at preventative diplomacy and prevented Secretary of State Colin Powell from being more effective.
”I don’t know what they let Powell do or not do,” Kerry told the Times. ”I know that it’s a war that’s been ongoing between the Defence Department and the State Department and the White House throughout this administration.
”I think simply Powell — who I know, like and admire — has been never permitted to be fully a secretary of state in the way that I envision the secretary of state.”
Kerry also criticised the Bush administration for avoiding dealing with the North Korean nuclear proliferation crisis while focusing its attention on ”the less threatening problem, Iraq, because it was the easier to solve”.
He told the newspaper that the Bush administration had sent ”mixed and bad messages” about proliferation through such policies as breaking the ABM treaty with Russia and moving to develop nuclear bunker-busting weapons.
”You’re sending a message that contravenes everything else you supposedly were taking seriously,” he said.
Kerry also took issue with attempts by the White House to portray him as weak and indecisive on foreign policy issues.
”People will know I’m tough and I’m prepared to do what is necessary to defend the United States of America, and that includes the unilateral deployment of troops if necessary,” Kerry said in the interview. – Sapa-AP