Bush's Iraq foes back his policies

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The Democratic presidential candidates have been attacking President Bush relentlessly on the Iraq war and occupation, but most of them would follow the same general course of action.

Ever since Mr. Bush sent American air, naval and ground forces into Iraq on March 19 to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, the Democratic candidates have been escalating their campaign rhetoric against the way the president went to war and is handling postwar reconstruction.

Their noisy political offensive has masked the fact that a majority of them would keep U.S. troops in Iraq while seeking increased financial and peacekeeping support from the United Nations and U.S. allies, just as the administration is doing.

No one in the nine-member Democratic field has been a fiercer critic of Mr. Bush's policies toward Iraq than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. He has leveled stinging attacks at key Democratic rivals who voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force to oust the Iraqi dictator from power.

But Mr. Dean, who maintains that the war resolution was "a mistake," says he would keep U.S. forces in Iraq. "Now that we're there, we can't just pull out," he has said in the candidate debates.

Mr. Dean says he would accelerate U.S. training of Iraqi army and police forces to take over the bulk of security operations, backed by a larger coalition of foreign troops and U.N. personnel to help with Iraq's reconstruction.

However, the administration already has begun to build a military and police force of some 70,000 Iraqis who are taking over more of the peacekeeping work, and it has won unanimous support from the U.N. Security Council for deploying foreign troops in Iraq in a multinational force that would be under U.S. command.

Indeed, the leading Democratic candidates are remarkably similar in saying what they would do in Iraq, and in most respects their positions are not much different from Mr. Bush's postwar agenda. Among them:

• Sen. John Kerry: The senator from Massachusetts voted for the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to take military action in Iraq, though Mr. Kerry now says it "was wrong to rush to war without building a true international coalition." However, like the president, he would speed up the training of Iraqi military and police forces and bring in the United Nations to share the load.