As Ralph Nader predicted, Thursday night's show was more of a joint press conference than a debate. Jim Lehrer can pick at rhetorical differences between Bush and Kerry for 90 minutes or 90 days. Either way, it is what they share, not where they differ, that was so evident in Thursday's "debate." Kerry made it crystal clear that whatever criticisms he has voiced about the war, he is not for pulling out of Iraq. If anything, Kerry previewed himself as the smarter, stronger occupier of Iraq. Further, am I the only one who noticed Kerry's warning shots for North Korea as unilateral alternatives to Bush's multilateral approach? Or how about Kerry's promise to double the size of the American Special Forces? Ask Haitians what they think of the US Special Forces. Maybe after hearing, Madison's Kerry supporters would take off those "Real Deal" stickers.
The point is that Bush and Kerry agree on the 'what' and the 'why' — especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Debates over how and when aren't what we need. It is the 'what' (i.e. the doctrine of preemption, occupation and militarism) that has killed over a thousand Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of Afghanis, tens of thousands of Iraqis and, yes, American foreign policy is to blame for the 3,000 dead on Sept. 11. The 'evil-doers' don't hate our freedom, they hate our leaders' back-stabbing foreign policy, and found an abhorrent way of making a point of it. Neither Bush nor Kerry want to pull out of Iraq, and thus are for condemning tens of thousands more to their death.
After considering this, it becomes quite evident why Bush and Kerry's handlers who staged Thursday's "debate" don't want Ralph Nader to take part. While over half of the country wants to see Ralph in the debates, Bush and Kerry know that keeping Nader marginalized takes priority over giving the real issues a hearing. The primary reason that the two-party corporate duopoly, as Ralph likes to call it, works for the American ruling class is that no left-wing challenge can emerge. And that's what make's Ralph's populist message so important.
If Ralph were in the debates, the two pro-war candidates would have been shamed in front of millions. Who else would bring up the racist witch-hunt of Arabs and Muslims that has paralleled this War on Terror? Who is bringing up the billions of tax-dollars funneled into Lockheed Martin and Halliburton (just to mention two contributors to the Kerry campaign) that could otherwise be spent on education, jobs, and health care? I do understand that this first debate was to focus exclusively on foreign policy, but this upholds precisely the false divisions that Bush and Kerry wish to maintain between America abroad and domestically. Over 60,000 Americans die each year from occupational disease and work-related injuries. To talk about keeping America safe, you have to talk about this. The more money we spend on the military, the less can go towards upholding workers' rights, providing affordable education and the kind of single-payer health care that Ralph Nader calls for.
Lastly, as proof that Kerry is more of a supplement than an opposition to Bush, why weren't the words "torture" or "Abu Ghraib" mentioned in this "debate?" Abu Ghraib is perhaps the most damning evidence of this occupation's illegality, immorality and its leaders' incompetence. Why no mention? Kerry fundamentally agrees that what the United States is doing in Iraq is worth the torture, the death and the ruin of Iraqi society. He doesn't say he wouldn't do it, he just says he can do it better … and that's a scary prospect.
Chris Dols ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.
