http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/politics/campaign/30KERR.htmlWASHINGTON — Issuing a new broadside against President Bush's national security policy, Senator John Kerry said that Mr. Bush's "almost myopic" focus on Iraq had made Americans "less safe" by giving North Korea and Iran the time and opportunity to speed toward the construction of nuclear weapons.
In an hourlong interview Friday on foreign policy, Mr. Kerry covered pre-emptive military strikes and a range of other issues. He termed the administration's approach to remaking Iraq a "crapshoot." And Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, touched on a series of proposals he will make next week to limit the spread of nuclear materials, arguing all the while that Mr. Bush's assessments of threats to America were riddled with misjudgments.
While he said that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was "in a worse neighborhood" and thus posed the potential of destabilizing the Mideast, Mr. Kerry argued that North Korea and Iran — and the loose nuclear material floating around the former Soviet Union — posed the more direct and serious threat of putting unconventional weapons into the hands of terror groups.
Mr. Bush, he argued, had relegated those problems to the back burner, adding that North Korea "was a far more compelling threat in many ways, and it belonged at the top of the agenda."
<more>