Washington – Sen. John Kerry says President Bush should bring home 20,000 troops from Iraq at Christmastime if the December parliamentary elections succeed.
Defeated by Bush last year and a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Kerry called for a “reasonable time frame” for pulling back troops rather than a full-scale withdrawal advocated by some Democrats. He said it could be completed in 12 to 15 months.
“It will be hard for this administration, but it is essential to acknowledge that the insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down … starting immediately after successful elections in December,” Kerry said Wednesday at George town University.
The presence of 159,000 U.S. troops in Iraq is deterring peace efforts, said Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“To undermine the insurgency, we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks,” he said. “At the first benchmark, the completion of December elections, we can start the process of reducing our forces by 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays.”
Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, has been a strong critic of Bush’s handling of the war, accusing the president of misleading the public into going to war.
