US election descends into the mire

It is a telling sign of how close the race has become that the Bush campaign -- as is their wont -- is pulling out all the stops to attempt to discredit Kerry. The conventional wisdom is that the American public has made up its mind that it is ready to dump Bush in November, but is not yet convinced that Kerry is the right man to replace him. If Kerry cannot convince the public that he would be a credible commander in chief, then Bush will win by default. It is thus that the centrepiece of the Bush campaign right now is not so much Bush's record as president as it is Kerry's unfitness for the presidency.

Kerry has made a big deal about his credentials as a decorated veteran. He opened his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention with the line: "My name is John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty," and a crisp salute to hammer home the point.

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The point was to counter the long-standing public perception of Democrats as weak on defence and national security and to highlight the fact that, President Bush, for all his tough talk, skipped out of serving in Vietnam in favour of a cushy berth in the Texas Air National Guard, and that once there apparently did not even make the effort to complete his commitment.

It is for this reason that the Republicans have now chosen to put John Kerry's military record front and centre in their attempts to discredit him.

The latest barrage against Kerry is an ad run by a group that calls itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that calls into question Kerry's service in Vietnam.

The ad in question features a devastating indictment of Kerry by thirteen other officers who also claim to have served with Kerry in Vietnam. The officers make statement such as: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first purple heart because I treated him for that injury" and "John Kerry lied to get his bronze star . . . I know, I was there, I saw what happened."

Or, as comedian Jon Stewart so aptly puts it, these statements would be devastating indictments, if they happened to be true.

The first problem with the ad is that none of the veterans quoted actually served on Kerry's swift boat in Vietnam. Some of them served alongside him in other swift boats patrolling the Mekong Delta, but, for the most part, what the officers quoted in the ad mean is that they served in the Vietnam War at roughly the same time as Kerry.

The second problem is that the claims they make are untrue.

For instance, the first claim I quote above, was made by medical officer Louis Letson, and it turns out that Letson is not the person listed on medical records as having treated Kerry. Letson has also stated in an affidavit that Kerry's wound was self-inflicted and did not merit a purple heart.

But the two crewman who were with Kerry that day say they have never met Letson, which calls into serious question his statement that "the crewman with Kerry told me there was no hostile fire, and that Kerry had inadvertently wounded himself with an M-79 grenade."

The second statement, made by Van O'Dell, who was serving as a gunner of another swift boat alongside Kerry's, is also highly suspect. The incident referred to was an ambush of the patrolling swift boats which consisted of the Viet Cong exploding mines under the boats and then opening fire from both riverbanks.

Under enemy fire from the banks, Kerry turned his boat around to return to the scene of the ambush and personally pulled a crewmate who had been blasted overboard by one of the mines out of the water. O'Dell, whose swift boat was also caught up in the ambush, claims that there was no firing from the banks and that Kerry falsified his account to get a medal.

O'Dell's account has been very effectively disputed by Kerry's crewmates, and the Navy's official after-action report, which normally includes input from all swift boat officers involved in a battle, confirms that the patrol came under enemy fire during the ambush. Basic common sense and military strategy also suggests that it wouldn't have been much of an ambush if there hadn't been sniper fire supporting the mines.

The ad is simply a calculated political slander. It is clear from their public statements that the swift boat officers who attempt to discredit Kerry have never forgiven him for his role in the anti-war movement on his return from Vietnam and his testimony before the Senate in which he stated that the US military had been guilty of systematic war crimes during the war, and it is this that is motivating their attack against him.

The ad is funded by a major Bush campaign donor, and the accompanying book Unfit for Command that has just been released by the right-wing Regnery Press and is shooting to the top of the best-seller lists is co-written by an extreme right-wing activist who has been quoted as referring to Bill Clinton as an "anti-American communist" and describing Islam as "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion."

Enough said about the credibility and decency of those who are associated with this attack on Kerry's record.

Republican Senator John McCain, who spent five and a half years as a POW after his plane was shot down in Vietnam, and is respected across the political spectrum, has called the ad "dishonest and dishonourable" and has called on President Bush to repudiate the ad. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Bush has declined to do so.

McCain shouldn't be surprised. When he was running against Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, the Bush campaign smeared him by spreading rumours that he had fathered a half-black love-child (McCain actually has a dark-skinned adopted daughter from Bangladesh) and that he might have gone a little crazy in his years in captivity.

The Republican National Convention will take place in New York in just over a week's time, and it will be interesting to see how the Republicans and President Bush present themselves. So far, Bush has run a negative campaign against John Kerry, but in New York he will have to defend his own record, which will not be easy to do.

In 1980, then candidate Ronald Reagan skewered President Carter with the simple question to the American people: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Indeed, as Bush prepares for New York, it is worth recalling Reagan's words at the Republican National Convention that nominated him for the presidency in 1980:

"Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, 'Well done'? Or at the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, 'Keep up the good work'? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, 'Let's have four more years of this'?"

Tough stuff. President Bush knows that he has no real answer to similar charges, which is why the only card he has left to play is to spend the next eighty days trying to convince the American public that John Kerry is unfit to be commander in chief. The ad run by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is just the opening salvo in what promises to be the most vicious US presidential campaign in memory.

Zafar Sobhan is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.