With U.S. casualties mounting steadily in Iraq, Americans can expect heated debates in the coming months between President Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry about who is to blame.

But there's likely to be much less discussion over what is to be done.

On Iraq and many other key foreign policy issues -- such as the Israeli- Palestinian dispute -- what's more notable about the 2004 campaign is how much the two men appear to agree.

Bush has undercut much of Kerry's criticism on Iraq by turning to the United Nations for help. Bush, who had long resisted a major role for the world body, said he will defer to U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the selection of the Iraqi government that is to assume nominal power in Baghdad after June 30.

The move essentially co-opted Kerry's long-standing proposal that the United Nations be given a key role in administering the occupation and organizing elections.

And beyond U.N. involvement, Kerry has said little about how he would handle Iraq differently, regardless of how chaotic the situation there may become.

Kerry, who voted for the 2002 Iraq war authorization resolution, has suggested sending thousands more troops to Iraq to combat the insurgency and opposes a pullout of U.S. troops. He has not taken detailed positions on Iraqi elections or how to pacify radical Sunnis and Shiites.

"If I understand John Kerry correctly, he's criticizing the conduct of the postwar period, but what he's proposing for the future doesn't strike me as a significantly different position than Bush," said Eliot Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

"In effect, the Kerry position is just, 'We're going to do a more efficient job of running Iraq than this administration.' "

Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton and Bush administrations, said Kerry seems less of a unilateralist than the president.

"Kerry would be more inclined to reach out to other countries," said Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt who now is president of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

"But if Iraq blows up, if there continue to be serious attacks on Americans, disruption within Iraq and the type of violence that is destabilizing, I can't see Kerry taking advantage of that, because he doesn't have his own proposals that are markedly different. And the administration can say it has to do anything to safeguard our troops, and that's a powerful, legitimate argument."

Rand Beers, Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser, said in an interview with The Chronicle: "We're assuming that we're going to inherit a very difficult situation in Iraq, with no quick answers."

Beers says a key difference between the two men is that while Bush is now talking about getting international support, he is likely to fail because he has antagonized Europeans with his unilateral, I'm-the-boss stance.

"Bush is the wrong messenger," Beers said. "We will go to the European powers at a higher level to get cooperation from NATO. We will get cooperation to share the burden because we take a different approach than this administration."

But European diplomats say Kerry's request may fall on deaf ears. They note that NATO is still failing to meet its troop commitments to Afghanistan, where the alliance has been given overall control of the international military mission.

There are differences between the candidates in some foreign policy areas.

On terrorism, Kerry advocates an expansion of the U.S. military by 40,000 troops, including an increase in special operations forces and peacekeeping training; a major increase in the Nunn-Lugar program for securing nuclear weapons and technology in the former Soviet Union; and added funds for firefighters and police to boost emergency preparedness.

The standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons program offers the clearest difference between the two. Kerry accuses the administration of ignoring the communist North's brazen pursuit of advanced weaponry, allowing Pyongyang to develop a long-range missile capacity that could threaten the continental United States. He criticizes Bush's insistence on negotiating with the North only in a multilateral setting and says he would accept North Korea's demand to engage immediately in direct, bilateral talks.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, there is virtually no difference between the two candidates. Bush has radically altered traditional U.S. policy by endorsing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans to keep many Jewish settlements in the West Bank and, in so doing, further freezing negotiations on the so-called road map toward peace. Kerry quickly backed Bush's move and edged even closer to Sharon than Bush, endorsing Israel's subsequent assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

Asked how Kerry's policy toward Israel and the Palestinians would differ from Bush's, Beers declined to offer specifics, but said Kerry would appoint a high-level presidential envoy to put pressure on both sides to restart the collapsed peace talks.

Kerry has had equal difficulty differentiating himself from the incumbent on the politically ticklish issue of Cuba.

In past years, Kerry has often criticized the 41-year-old U.S. economic sanctions on Fidel Castro's communist government. But during this year's campaign, Kerry has emphasized his support of the embargo and taken a hard line against Castro.

Last month in south Florida -- a crucial electoral state with a major Cuban population -- Kerry said he had voted in favor of the 1996 Helms- Burton bill that tightened sanctions. The claim boom- eranged when Republican officials pointed out that Kerry actually had voted against the bill. Kerry was forced to backtrack, saying he had voted for the original Senate bill but voted against the final version because it added a provision called Title III that lets Americans sue people or companies who control properties confiscated from Americans in the early 1960s. Both President Bill Clinton and President Bush opted to waive enforcement of Title III.

Elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, Kerry has tried to outflank Bush from the right by loosing a broadside against Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez. He accused Chavez of "allowing Venezuela to become a haven for narco-terrorists" and supporting leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia --

charges that some U.S. officials and most independent analysts have said are unproved.

Little change would be likely in the war on drugs in a Kerry administration, because Bush has essentially adopted the Clinton administration's Plan Colombia, a program of military and economic aid to the Andean nations to fight drug trafficking and leftist guerrillas. Under the plan, about 400 U.S. military advisers and special forces troops, along with hundreds of employees of U.S. private military firms, are stationed in Colombia.

In addition to all the similarities, there's an additional reason why Kerry might not want to make foreign policy his chief line of attack. Despite the unfavorable developments in Iraq and the uncomfortable revelations about the administration's behavior prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's positions seem to remain popular with Americans.

Polls released last week showed that slightly more than half of Americans feel it was worth going to war in Iraq, a proportion little changed since early April. About 4 in 10 believe sending in troops was a mistake, essentially unchanged from October.

The best news for Bush came in a Washington Post-ABC poll. By 52 percent to 41 percent, people said they trust Bush more than Kerry to handle Iraq, and by 58 percent to 37 percent, Americans prefer Bush over Kerry to run the fight against terrorism.

Walker, the Clinton administration's Near Eastern affairs official, said Bush is riding high "because the opposition doesn't look like it's got its act together yet. Most people think, 'Don't change horses in midstream.'

"If Kerry doesn't define himself more, get away from this nonsense of just relying on his war record and start to set forth clear policies -- on Iraq, the Palestinian issue, the war on terrorism -- there's a case to be made, but I don't see him making it yet."

Cohen, at Johns Hopkins, doubts that any significant differences during the election would survive the realities of power.

"When I look at the kinds of people who are advising Kerry, assuming Kerry runs his foreign policy from center and right of the Democratic Party, it would be very compatible with the Bush administration," he said.

"There's always more consensus on macro foreign policy issues than either party is willing to admit," Cohen said. "Between administrations, it looks like we're zigging and zagging more than we really do."

Kerry's caution, however, may provide an opportunity for independent candidate Ralph Nader, who last week pledged to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq within six months. Nader has received as high as 6 percent support in national polls, causing many Democrats to fear a repeat of his spoiler role in the 2000 race, in which he appeared to deny Al Gore the margin of victory in Florida and New Hampshire -- and thus the entire election.

Phyllis Bennis, an analyst at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said many anti-war voters who supported Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries are likely to flirt with Nader but come back to Kerry.

"Kerry represents a more traditional internationalist who is certainly interested in maintaining U.S. power in the world but is not prepared to use the kind of ruthless military attack that has come to characterize Bush's drive toward empire," Bennis said.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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