Kerry Slams Timing of Iraq Switch

John F. Kerry charged Tuesday that the Bush administration had politicized the transfer of power in Iraq, calling the June 30 deadline to hand control back to the Iraqis a “fiction,” arbitrarily selected with an eye to the November presidential election.

“I think that they want us to get the troops out and get the transfer out of the way as fast as possible without regard to the stability of Iraq,” Kerry told reporters after his first public campaign rally since undergoing shoulder surgery last week.

But when Kerry, the likely Democratic nominee, was pressed about what he would do differently than President Bush to resolve the worsening situation in Iraq, he fell back on his long-standing -- and not very specific -- response: Bring in other nations to help.

“There are so many things you could do differently in Iraq that it’s hard to know where to begin in terms of that list,” Kerry said during a news conference here. “Most important is to get the international community involved, because you have to change the entire dynamic of an uprising and the entire dynamic of an American occupation.”

The Massachusetts’ senator’s comments on the campaign trail came against a backdrop of growing violence in Iraq.

A fierce firefight in the Sunni Triangle city of Ramadi, where support for former President Saddam Hussein is strong, left a dozen Marines dead and 20 others wounded on Tuesday. Three days of fighting in Sunni and Shiite Muslim areas have claimed the lives of 30 Americans, two other coalition troops and at least 120 Iraqis.

During an interview taped Tuesday for broadcast today on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Kerry used the term “fiction” to describe the June 30 deadline for U.S. occupation forces to hand over control of the country to an interim Iraqi government. He amplified those comments in interviews with local broadcast reporters in Cincinnati and during a brief news conference.

“I hope that date has nothing to do with the election here in the United States,” Kerry said, openly hinting that he thought it did.

The planned June 30 handover would fall shortly before the U.S. presidential campaign is expected to heat up with the Democratic and GOP conventions this summer.

“The test of a turnover of sovereignty is the stability of Iraq, not an arbitrary date,” Kerry said. He called the escalating violence in Iraq “deeply disturbing to all of us,” and he said during the news conference that U.S. efforts “have to be successful.” The way to success there, he said, was to pursue a policy “that brings all nations to the table to understand the stakes.”

“This administration has yet to provide Americans with a thorough understanding of exactly who we are turning the authority over to and precisely what the consequences of that will be,” said Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 1985. “And I think Americans are owed an explanation.”

With U.S. military forces and civilians under siege in some parts of Iraq in recent days, Kerry appears to sense a political opening to confront the president more aggressively. His comments Tuesday were his harshest to date of the Bush administration’s plan to establish a new government structure in Iraq and provide an exit strategy for American military forces.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, called Kerry’s comments just “another example of John Kerry playing politics with the war in Iraq.” Kerry’s Senate vote in favor of the Iraqi war was made “through the filter of his presidential candidacy,” Schmidt charged.

Schmidt questioned Kerry’s motives in ramping up talk about Iraq, and noted that the candidate had felt pressure from Democratic primary voters to run on an antiwar plank. Kerry voted for the congressional resolution giving Bush authority to use force in Iraq, but then voted against $87 billion in additional funding for the war effort.

Kerry’s comments on Iraq overshadowed the stated purpose of his first full day on the campaign trail in a week. The campaign is trying to broaden its focus this week from job creation to fiscal responsibility. It was the theme of Kerry’s rally at the Ohio River. And he promises it will be the thrust of a speech he is to give today in Washington, D.C., that will lay out the framework of his budget plans.

Here in the GOP stronghold of Hamilton County, Kerry talked Tuesday about the tough choices middle-class Americans make every day with family budgets. He chided Bush, saying the president had not been equally responsible with the federal budget. “If you ran your household the way this administration has piled up $6 trillion of unpaid proposals, you’d lose your home, you’d lose your car and you’d lose your children’s future,” Kerry charged.

“The Bush administration has not just run up the deficit with respect to the budget. They’ve run up a truth deficit in the United States of America.”

Kerry, who has been portrayed by Republicans in speeches and television ads as a liberal Democrat who flip-flops on issues, said Bush has racked up “a long list of broken promises ... of flips and flops.”

He said the president promised not to run up a deficit and promised to create jobs, but that the country faces a steep deficit and has lost more than 2 million jobs since Bush took office.