Kerry Iraq Plan Hit As Vague

John Kerry says he can "put a deal together" as president to drastically reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq, a pledge reminiscent of Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War and Dwight D. Eisenhower's promise to stop the fighting in Korea.

Like those Republican presidential candidates, the Democrat's blueprint for peace lacks detail and has critics squawking.

With voters skittish about the death toll in Iraq, Kerry is pinning blame on President Bush and his shaky relationships with allies who have refused to support U.S. troops with soldiers of their own.

The four-term Massachusetts senator suggests he has back-channel assurances that foreign leaders would do more if he were president.

"There is a potential to be able to put a deal together over the course of time," Kerry said.

In a separate interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kerry said the replacement of most U.S. troops with foreign forces was a "reasonable" goal.

Mr. Bush, meanwhile, was headed for Dallas on Tuesday, where he address the annual convention of the Knights of Columbus — the world's largest lay Catholic organization with 1.7 million members.

About 2,500 Knights and their families are expected at the convention in Dallas, along with 60 bishops and 13 cardinals.

The Knights didn't invite Kerry — a Catholic — to speak. While officially nonpartisan, the conservative-leaning group strongly supports Mr. Bush's opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

The nation's 65 million Catholics constitute 27 percent of the electorate.

Kerry's Iraq proposal is similar to the unspecified plans for peace offered by Eisenhower and Nixon.

In 1952, Eisenhower was running against Democrat Adlai Stevenson to replace unpopular incumbent Harry Truman when he promised to "concentrate on the job of ending the Korea war. ... That job requires a personal trip to Korea," he said. "I shall go to Korea."

Truman called the pledge a "desperate attempt to get votes."

And in 1968, Nixon sought political gain from anti-war fervor when he touted a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Kerry, a decorated veteran of that conflict, reminds some of Nixon when he talks of vague deals with foreign leaders.

"I don't care what it sounds like," Kerry told ABC. "The fact is that I'm not going to negotiate in public today without the presidency."

The Vietnam War ended after Nixon left office. Eisenhower oversaw the 1953 Korean War armistice.

Republicans have been quick to attack Kerry's proposal.

"John Kerry has an enormous lack of credibility on this issue," said Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt.

The Massachusetts senator voted against the first Persian Gulf War, which threw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. Eleven years later, he voted to give Mr. Bush authority to use force against Saddam, then voted against a bill to help pay for the conflict as anti-war sentiment threatened to undermine his bid for the Democratic nomination.

Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Kerry's plan assumes too much.

"Nobody is going to bail us out of our responsibilities in this conflict," said Cordesman, former adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "It is not a matter of who is the president at this point. There simply won't be any international support for a country like France or Germany to do it."