WASHINGTON, Oct 31 (AFP) - Iraq and terrorism cast an imposing shadow over the US presidential election even before Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden dropped a political bombshell on the eve of the polls.
"I don't think that there has been an election in which foreign policy has been this important since 1968 with the Vietnam War," said Daniel Benjamin, National Security Council staff director for counterterrorism during the Clinton administration.
The twin issues are "going to be enormously important" in determining the result of the November 2 elections," said Benjamin, the author of "The Age of Sacred Terror," which documents the rise of Al-Qaeda and religiously motivated terrorism, as well as America's efforts to combat that threat after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In the run up to the hotly contested polls, not a day passes without President George W. Bush and challenger Senator John Kerry repeating their stands on Iraq and terrorism.
Bush considers the Iraq war part of his global war on terrorism while Kerry castigates Bush for diverting resources from terrorism frontline Afghanistan to invade Iraq.
The bloody insurrection in Iraq continues to dominate American TV screens with the human and financial costs mounting each day.
As of Saturday, more than 1,100 Americans have been killed and more than 8,000 wounded, Pentagon figures show. The cost to the American taxpayer is well over 100 billion dollars and climbing since the US-led invasion in March 2003.
Global terrorist attacks are also mounting. Some 625 people died and 3,646 were wounded in 2003, according to the State Department's latest "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which acknowledges that "significant incidents" increased from 60 percent of total attacks in 2002 to 84 percent in 2003.
When Americans were asked in a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll in early October what were the issues most important to their vote, they named terrorism "Number One", and Iraq "Number Two", together with the state of the economy.
Despite the importance of Iraq in the election, there are few policy differences on the issue between Bush and Kerry.
The two emphasize the same points -- training security forces, rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, holding elections as scheduled in January and encouraging more international support for the Iraqi transition.
Neither of them talks about committing more troops even though they both vow to remain in Iraq until there is an elected government and the security situation stabilizes.
"It's hard to see what the differences are -- because I don't think there are many alternatives in Iraq," Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, said in a report.
The key difference is the question of leadership, with each candidate arguing he will execute a plan in Iraq more effectively.
"The Iraq issue captures two of the major themes of this election: the differences between the two candidates' leadership styles and their US foreign policy vision," said James Lindsay, vice-president of the council.
Bush speaks of the Iraq war as the cornerstone of his forward-leaning, offensive strategy in the war on terrorism while Kerry emphasizes the need for more international consultation on foreign policy, a strategy he says will help the United States "regain respect abroad."
Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution said he was surprised that Kerry "seems almost to have put all of his chips in the pot" by taking Bush head-on over the issues of Iraq and terrorism.
"The Kerry people will explain why the've made an absolutely brilliant choice, if he wins, or why they blew it if he lost by moving away from these issues that all of the polls show us are his strong points, the domestic issues, particularly the economy and instead settled on an issue on which, at least on the terrorism part of it, he has never had the majority of the support and Iraq, it has always been half and half," Hess said.
Any notion that Iraq and terrorism would be pushed to the sidelines at the closing stage of the election campaign was dismissed when bin Laden burst into television screens Friday with his first videotaped message in more than a year.
"Your security does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush or Al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands," he told Americans, triggering debate if his appearance would help Bush by reminding voters of his war on terror or aid Kerry by cautioning them that bin Laden was still at large.
10/31/2004 02:12 GMT - AFP