Democrats blast Bush for his faulty Iraq policy

US soldiers and Iraqi policemen deployed at the scene of an explosion in front of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Baghdad yesterday. An Iraqi hospital ambulance rammed into a barricade in front the ICRC, setting off a huge explosion. PHOTO: AFP

"This president has done it wrong every step of the way," US Senator John Kerry said at the debate sponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute.

"He promised that he would have a real coalition. He has a fraudulent coalition. He promised he would go through the United Nations and honor the inspections process. He did not."

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"He promised he would go to war as a last resort ... He did not," the Massachusetts senator said.

"Our troops are today more exposed, are in greater danger, because this president didn't put together a real coalition, because this president's been unwilling to share the burden and the task," Kerry added.

The war in Iraq has proved consistently to be one of the most frequently raised issues in the periodic presidential debates, providing fodder for attacks by the Democratic contenders against one another, as well as against the current US administration.

During the 90 minute forum Sunday, Democrats had especially sharp disagreements over whether or not it was a good idea to support Bush's recent request for an additional 87 billion to stabilize Iraq.

But Bush was the target of much of the invective about alleged US foreign policy miscues: The presidential hopefuls slammed the US president for a variety of policy missteps including everything from not tracking down terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to failing to gain greater international support in Iraq.

New York-based civil rights activist Al Sharpton advocated a speedy withdrawal of US troops in Iraq.

"Bush was wrong to go in the first place. To delay coming out is not going to make it right. We need to not get into another Vietnam," Sharpton said.

That view was echoed by Carol Mosley Braun, a former US senator from Illinois.

"I stand with the mothers of the young men and women who are there, and believe that, as Americans, we have to bring our troops home but we have to bring them home with honor," she said, but only after rebuilding the war-torn country.

"We blew the place up, we have to fix it back," she said.

Retired Army General Wesley Clark meanwhile, accused the administration of a pulling a "bait and switch" ruse on US voters in waging the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"Right after Sept 11, this administration determined to do bait and switch on the American public. President Bush said he was going to get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. Instead, he went after Saddam Hussein. He doesn't have either one of them today," Clark said.

"The failure of this administration was not to put the troops in to finish the job against Osama bin Laden. And you know why they didn't do it? They didn't do it because, all along, their plan was to save those troops to go after Saddam Hussein," the retired general said.

Asked whether as the former chief executive of a small rural state he possessed the foreign policy credentials to occupy the Oval Office, ex-Vermont Governor Howard Dean noted that "I have as much foreign-policy experience as George W. Bush did when he got into office -- and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter," he said, citing the names of various former governors who succeeded in being elected president.

"I would submit to you that my foreign-policy experience might be more valuable in the White House today than the foreign-policy experience of many of the people who supported the Iraq war," Dean continued.