In the 2004 US presidential debates, Democratic nominee John Kerry strongly criticised the manner in which the Bush administration had launched the war in Iraq in 2003. His foremost criticism was that the campaign was not sufficiently multilateral, leaving the USA to bear ‘90 percent of the casualties in Iraq and 90 percent of the costs’. He suggested that closer attention to alliance-building and more engagement with the United Nations would remedy the situation. This line of attack was well calculated to appeal to US public opinion. George W. Bush responded that he had in fact engaged the UN and that Kerry was undervaluing the coalition that had been built for the Iraq campaign. However, he was clearly on the defensive and struggled to fend off Kerry's repeated charge that ‘we can do better’ at coalition-building.

Kerry's second line of criticism was decidedly less successful. He charged that the Iraq campaign failed ‘the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you're doing it for legitimate reasons’. Kerry suggested that the Bush administration's refusal ‘to deal at length with the United Nations’ was part of the reason for this failure. This line of attack backfired. Bush immediately challenged the notion of a ‘global test’ as undermining the USA's right to protect itself and referred to it in subsequent debates to portray Kerry as insufficiently committed to US security.