The Opinionated Bastard

LEHRER: Good evening, Mr. President, Senator Kerry.

As determined by a coin toss, the first question goes to you, Senator Kerry. You have two minutes.

Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?

KERRY: Yes, I do.

But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. I want to thank the University of Miami for hosting us. And I know the president will join me in welcoming all of Florida to this debate. You've been through the roughest weeks anybody could imagine. Our hearts go out to you. And we admire your pluck and perseverance.

I can make American safer than President Bush has made us.

And I believe President Bush and I both love our country equally. But we just have a different set of convictions about how you make America safe.

I believe America is safest and strongest when we are leading the world and we are leading strong alliances.

I'll never give a veto to any country over our security. But I also know how to lead those alliances.

This president has left them in shatters across the globe, and we're now 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq and 90 percent of the costs.

I think that's wrong, and I think we can do better.

I have a better plan for homeland security. I have a better plan to be able to fight the war on terror by strengthening our military, strengthening our intelligence, by going after the financing more authoritatively, by doing what we need to do to rebuild the alliances, by reaching out to the Muslim world, which the president has almost not done, and beginning to isolate the radical Islamic Muslims, not have them isolate the United States of America.

I know I can do a better job in Iraq. I have a plan to have a summit with all of the allies, something this president has not yet achieved, not yet been able to do to bring people to the table.

We can do a better job of training the Iraqi forces to defend themselves, and I know that we can do a better job of preparing for elections.

All of these, and especially homeland security, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

LEHRER: Mr. President, you have a 90-second rebuttal.

BUSH: I, too, thank the University of Miami, and say our prayers are with the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot.

Oh, yeah, we should have a bunch of meetings. That'll keep the country safe. Meetings. Hey, maybe we can send "sternly worded letters" to the terrorists.

Oh, and nice die job on the hair. I see you got your eyebrows trimmed too.

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes.

Do you believe the election of Senator Kerry on November the 2nd would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack?

BUSH: Senator Kerry has voted against practically every single defense and intelligence appropriation bill that's ever come around. I think having him in Congress was bad enough, I shudder to think what would happen if he was in the White House.

Luckily, we won't have to worry about that, because I'm going to wipe the floor with this pansy.

LEHRER: New question, two minutes, Senator Kerry.

Colossal misjudgments. What colossal misjudgments, in your opinion, has President Bush made in these areas?

KERRY: Well, where do you want me to begin?

First of all, he made the misjudgment of saying to America that he was going to build a true alliance, that he would exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and go through the inspections.

In fact, he first didn't even want to do that. And it wasn't until former Secretary of State Jim Baker and General Scowcroft and others pushed publicly and said you've got to go to the U.N., that the president finally changed his mind -- his campaign has a word for that -- and went to the United Nations.

Now, once there, we could have continued those inspections.

We had Saddam Hussein trapped.

He also promised America that he would go to war as a last resort.

Those words mean something to me, as somebody who has been in combat. Last resort. You've got to be able to look in the eyes of families and say to those parents, I tried to do everything in my power to prevent the loss of your son and daughter.

I don't believe the United States did that.

And we pushed our allies aside.

And so, today, we are 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost: $200 billion -- $200 billion that could have been used for health care, for schools, for construction, for prescription drugs for seniors, and it's in Iraq.

And Iraq is not even the center of the focus of the war on terror. The center is Afghanistan, where, incidentally, there were more Americans killed last year than the year before; where the opium production is 75 percent of the world's opium production; where 40 to 60 percent of the economy of Afghanistan is based on opium; where the elections have been postponed three times.

The president moved the troops, so he's got 10 times the number of troops in Iraq than he has in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is. Does that mean that Saddam Hussein was 10 times more important than Osama bin Laden -- than, excuse me, Saddam Hussein more important than Osama bin Laden? I don't think so.

LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.

BUSH: Kerry is trying to fight the wrong war. I don't blame him, it would be much easier to fight a small war against Osama Bin Laden then a large war against terrorism. But it would be a colossal error in judgment.

Because, unfortunately, we don't have that choice. We have to fight a global war against a global threat, terrorism. When you really dig into the causes and cures of terrorism, you come to one inescapable conclusion. In order to truly defeat terrorism, you have to strike back at the terrorists, at those who harbor the terrorists, and the nations that support terrorists. You have to take the fight to the terrorists.

Its not just enough to defeat those terrorists though you have to also get rid of the root cause. You need to spread freedom and liberty throughout the world. Only then will America be truly safe.

My opponent thinks I made a colossal error in judgment. I think he is making a colossal error in vision.

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President. Two minutes.

What about Senator Kerry's point, the comparison he drew between the priorities of going after Osama bin Laden and going after Saddam Hussein?

BUSH: My goal is not to get a single man, its to get all of Al Queda to root it out from all over the world. But Al Queda is only one of many terrorist organizations. Fighting terrorism is like fighting an octopus. If you cut off one tentacle, it will grow back. To kill an octopus, you have to get at the head, the root cause. And that means leading the Middle East to liberty.

LEHRER: Senator Kerry, 90 seconds.

KERRY: The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it.

The president made the judgment to divert forces from under General Tommy Franks from Afghanistan before the Congress even approved it to begin to prepare to go to war in Iraq.

And he rushed the war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace. Now, that is not the judgment that a president of the United States ought to make. You don't take America to war unless have the plan to win the peace. You don't send troops to war without the body armor that they need.

I've met kids in Ohio, parents in Wisconsin places, Iowa, where they're going out on the Internet to get the state-of-the-art body gear to send to their kids. Some of them got them for a birthday present.

I think that's wrong. Humvees -- 10,000 out of 12,000 Humvees that are over there aren't armored. And you go visit some of those kids in the hospitals today who were maimed because they don't have the armament.

This president just -- I don't know if he sees what's really happened on there. But it's getting worse by the day. More soldiers killed in June than before. More in July than June. More in August than July. More in September than in August.

And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there.

BUSH: Can I respond to that?

LEHRER: Let's do one of these one-minute extensions. You have 30 seconds.

BUSH: Thank you, sir.

You voted against the 87 billion dollars to pay for some of that, and now you claim it was my fault? I asked the generals what they needed, they told me, and I did my best to make sure that they got it.

While you voted against it.

LEHRER: We'll come back to Iraq in a moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. This is a two-minute new question, Senator Kerry.

As president, what would you do, specifically, in addition to or differently to increase the homeland security of the United States than what President Bush is doing?

KERRY: Jim, let me tell you exactly what I'll do. And there are a long list of thing. First of all, what kind of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is cutting the COPS program in America?

What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we're shutting firehouses who are the first- responders here in America.

The president hasn't put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems. That's why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there. We hadn't done the work that ought to be done.

The president -- 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X- rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.

Does that make you feel safer in America?

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren't my values. I believe in protecting America first.

And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security and I'm going to make sure we're not cutting COPS programs in America and we're fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.

The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn't want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.

And there's an enormous undone job to protect the loose nuclear materials in the world that are able to get to terrorists. That's a whole other subject, but I see we still have a little bit more time.

Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union -- former Soviet Union for 13 years. I'm going to do it in four years. And we're going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.

BUSH: While the buck may stop at my desk, the reality is that its your local mayor, fire chief and police chief who are responsible for your local firemen and policemen. That said, our first responders are an important part of Homeland Security, which is why I've increased funding for them as part of Homeland Security to $3 billion.

However, you're right that I cut the C-O-P-S program. You're talking about a program that pays for balloons to hand out to schoolkids. Since September 11, its seemed more important to me that we help our police protect us against terrorism then hand out ballons. Evidentially you disagree, but as President you have to make tough choices. So no to Balloons, yes to Homeland Security.

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a, quote, "miscalculation," of what the conditions would be in post-war Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: I think everyone expected Saddam to fight more then he had, for the major combat to last longer then in did. Instead, in part due to the brilliant planning by Tommy Franks, Saddam's evil regime burst like a bubble. General Franks called it a catastrophic success because while we had made lots of plans for the post-combat period, events overtook us, and we needed them before they were completely ready.

The other thing we had a hard time believing was just how evil Saddam really was. We knew that he had killed his own people, that he had used weapons of mass destruction against them. It is hard for good people to envision evil. We had a lot of good people involved in the planning, but I think that we were all shocked at the extent of how Saddam had destroyed his own country. While some people call this the "reconstruction" of Iraq, after 30 years of Saddam, its almost like "construction". We have to build a country where there was none.

LEHRER: New question. Senator Kerry, two minutes. You just -- you've repeatedly accused President Bush -- not here tonight, but elsewhere before -- of not telling the truth about Iraq, essentially of lying to the American people about Iraq. Give us some examples of what you consider to be his not telling the truth.

KERRY: Well, I've never, ever used the harshest word, as you did just then. And I try not to. I've been -- but I'll nevertheless tell you that I think he has not been candid with the American people. And I'll tell you exactly how.

First of all, we all know that in his state of the union message, he told Congress about nuclear materials that didn't exist.

We know that he promised America that he was going to build this coalition. I just described the coalition. It is not the kind of coalition we were described when we were talking about voting for this.

The president said he would exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and go through that full process. He didn't. He cut if off, sort of arbitrarily.

And we know that there were further diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards.

Now, he misled the American people in his speech when he said we will plan carefully. They obviously didn't. He misled the American people when he said we'd go to war as a last resort. We did not go as a last resort. And most Americans know the difference.

Now, this has cost us deeply in the world. I believe that it is important to tell the truth to the American people. I've worked with those leaders the president talks about, I've worked with them for 20 years, for longer than this president. And I know what many of them say today, and I know how to bring them back to the table.

And I believe that a fresh start, new credibility, a president who can understand what we have to do to reach out to the Muslim world to make it clear that this is not, you know -- Osama bin Laden uses the invasion of Iraq in order to go out to people and say that America has declared war on Islam.

We need to be smarter about now we wage a war on terror. We need to deny them the recruits. We need to deny them the safe havens. We need to rebuild our alliances.

I believe that Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, and the others did that more effectively, and I'm going to try to follow in their footsteps.

LEHRER: Ninety seconds, Mr. President.

BUSH: I've always tried to be truthful to the American people. I've always told them Iraq was going to be difficult, but it was necessary because Saddam was a threat, as my opponent has said on numerous occasions.

Long before September 11th, Osama Bin Laden used Iraq to recruit people. We can't use how Osama Bin Laden might react to decide what we can do. The President has to do what he must to keep the people of America safe. That's my job. If Osama Bin Laden doesn't like it when I keep the people of America safe, I think that's a good thing.

LEHRER: Thirty seconds. We'll do a 30 second here.

KERRY: I wasn't misleading when I said he was a threat. Nor was I misleading on the day that the president decided to go to war when I said that he had made a mistake in not building strong alliances and that I would have preferred that he did more diplomacy.

I've had one position, one consistent position, that Saddam Hussein was a threat. There was a right way to disarm him and a wrong way. And the president chose the wrong way.

LEHRER: Thirty seconds, Mr. President.

BUSH: Sending Saddam more pieces of paper wasn't going to keep America safe.

LEHRER: New question. Two minutes, Senator Kerry.

What is your position on the whole concept of preemptive war?

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way? So what is at test here is the credibility of the United States of America and how we lead the world. And Iran and Iraq are now more dangerous -- Iran and North Korea are now more dangerous.

Now, whether preemption is ultimately what has to happen, I don't know yet. But I'll tell you this: As president, I'll never take my eye off that ball. I've been fighting for proliferation the entire time -- anti-proliferation the entire time I've been in the Congress. And we've watched this president actually turn away from some of the treaties that were on the table.

You don't help yourself with other nations when you turn away from the global warming treaty, for instance, or when you refuse to deal at length with the United Nations.

You have to earn that respect. And I think we have a lot of earning back to do.

LEHRER: Ninety seconds.

BUSH: Global Test? That's just weird. If America is threatened, you're going to have meetings and focus groups? Take a poll? No, if America is threatened, you take action. That's my job as president.

Will those actions always be "popular"? No. In fact, I guarantee you they won't be popular with terrorists. Sitting in the big chair means making tough decisions, and following through with them. It doesn't mean only making popular decisions.