WASHINGTON, July 29 (AFP) - Given that national security is the top priority in voters' minds, the leading US dailies Thursday urged Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to make clear once and for all how he stands on defense and, above all, on Iraq.
Recalling former president Bill Clinton's "masterful" description of Kerry as a man of courage, strength and wisdom Monday at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, The Washington Post said that only Kerry "can close the sale."
When he addresses the convention late Thursday in the grand finale of the four-day event, Kerry's "first objective ... will be to convince voters that he is a credible potential commander in chief," said the Post.
"The doubts about Mr. Kerry concern not his courage, but his judgement and conviction," said The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Massachusetts Senator has served longer in Congress than at the front during the Vietnam war.
The New York Times goes one step further in exhorting Kerry to tell Americans what he would have done in Iraq, a question on which he has been "impossibly opaque."
The daily said it understood Kerry's backing of President George W. Bush's decision last year to take on Iraq, given the intelligence that he was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and intent on developing nuclear bombs.
"We can appreciate Mr. Kerry's complaints that he was misled on both counts. But he and (running mate John) Edwards have refused to say whether they would have acted differently if they had known then what they know now.
"That's unfair. When it comes to using force abroad, voters deserve a clear idea of how high Mr. Kerry would raise the bar from where Mr. Bush lowered it," said the Times.
The Wall Street Journal noted that on the Iraq issue Kerry has swung from pacifist, when he voted against an 87 billion dollar funding bill to finish the job in Iraq, to "moderately hawkish" now that he has won the nomination.
"He assails the president's management of the war but proposes more or less the same policy," said the Journal, welcoming his vow not to withdraw abruptly from Iraq if he is elected, but wondering how he would stand up to pressure from his center-left coalition to do exactly that.
"All in all," said the Journal, "it is hard to resist the conclusion that if John Kerry had been president the last four years, Saddam would still be running Iraq."