Bush's plan of more troops for Iraq "ignores" generals' advice: Kerry

U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq "ignores the best advice from our own generals," Democratic Senator John Kerry said Saturday.

"Another 21,000 troops sent into Iraq, with no visible end or strategy, ignores the best advice from our own generals and isn't the best way to keep faith with the courage and commitment of our soldiers," Kerry said in the Democratic weekly radio address.

Kerry, a Democratic from Massachusetts, was the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 2004.

"Today, they have grown disillusioned," he said of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq.

He said the war fought by American soldiers "to protect the world from Iraq's imagined weapons of mass destruction" ended a long time ago, and Iraq "is immersed in a bloody civil war."

The "surge," or more troops for Iraq, "is nothing more than the escalation of a misguided war," he said.

If there was a yes or no vote this week on whether the United States should keep up an indefinite presence in Iraq, it would be voted down, Kerry said.

Bush unveiled his new Iraq strategy last month, which included sending over 20,000 more troops to Iraq. The plan, however, has met strong resistance from Democrats as well as some Republicans.

Senate Republicans blocked a full-floor debate this week on a nonbinding resolution opposing Bush's plan to increase American troop levels in Iraq.

Kerry said the United States should change its mission in Iraq to training Iraqi security forces and focusing its efforts on removing the threat posed by foreign fighters in Iraq, not patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods under the threat of roadside bombs, and the United States should "get tough with Iraqi politicians -- pressure them to meet tough benchmarks."

He suggested that the Iraqis would work harder to achieve a political solution to their deadly conflict if they realized that they couldn't "rely indefinitely on American troops as a security blanket."

"Congress must push this administration to find not just a new way forward in Iraq, but the right way forward," he said.

Also on Saturday, Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said he had a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by March 2003.

Officially declaring his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, Obama said it was time to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

"It's time, it's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreements in the lives and heart of someone else's civil war," he said.

Describing the war as "a tragic mistake," he said he had opposed the Iraq war from the start, and he had "a plan that will bring our combat troops home by March of 2008."

Currently there are about 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and more than 3,000 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the country since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

Source: Xinhua