Kennedy sticks to war criticism

WASHINGTON -- Senator Edward M. Kennedy went before a national television audience yesterday to defend his call for the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Massachusetts Democrat said that the insurgency stems from Iraqis not believing that they "own the country." Setting calendar goals for training Iraqis to free US troops to leave, he said, is the solution.

"Why can't we expect that we can train their troops in four months, eight months, 12 months, 15 months?" Kennedy said. "We ought to establish as a goal -- not as a requirement, as a goal -- that we are going to negotiate that time frame with the new Iraqi government, but as a goal that we want our troops out by 2006."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, appearing separately on "Meet the Press" yesterday, said it would be "misleading" to set a specific calendar date for withdrawal and said coalition forces were making Iraqi troop training a priority.

Kennedy delivered a much-publicized speech on Jan. 27 calling for troop withdrawals to begin immediately after the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections, saying that the presence of US troops was fueling the insurgency and comparing Iraq to Vietnam.

The timing of his speech provided fodder to his critics when, three days later, the elections had higher turnout and less violence than expected. Footage of Iraqis joyously voting clashed with Kennedy's portrayal of the endeavor.

Yesterday, Kennedy conceded that the election had been a success, but said the ultimate solution remains making it clear to Iraqis that the US is not a permanent occupier. Americans should not have to keep dying and financing Iraqi security, he added.

"The problem is at the present time the Iraqis do not believe that they own the country," he said. "The elections were an important down payment on that, but still they ought to be able to have the kind of security and . . . ought to be trained. We ought to get about the business of doing it. Why can't they defend their own country?"

The Bush administration has repeatedly rejected the idea of setting a timetable for troop withdrawals. In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush said setting an "artificial timetable for leaving Iraq . . . would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out."

"It seems to me that the answer as to when our troops can come out is dependent upon the conditions on the ground and whether or not the Iraqis are capable of managing the security situation there," Rumsfeld said on "Meet the Press." "We're working very hard to see that they can."

On ABC's "This Week," Rumsfeld conceded that Iraq will need additional time to create a force capable of handling a potential attack from its neighbors, including Iran. However, he said Bush's statement in his State of the Union Address that US troops will leave Iraq when the country is "able to defend itself" referred only to coping with the insurgency.

"What he meant was that the Iraqis' internal security forces would be capable of managing the security situation inside the country," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld also yesterday offered a glimpse of the classified intelligence estimate about Iran's nuclear weapons program in a CNN interview, suggesting that it is seen as "years away." But he also voiced caution about the accuracy of the intelligence.

"I don't make estimates -- that's the business for the intelligence community," Rumsfeld said. "They're some years away according to the estimates, but I don't know if the estimates are correct or not."

The Bush administration based its decision to go to war against Iraq in part on claims that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program, but no such weapons were found after the war. The administration has so far pursued diplomatic means to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

In his Jan. 27 speech on Iraq, Kennedy had also called on Bush to announce the withdrawal of 12,000 US troops immediately after the Iraqi election to signal he had a "genuine exit strategy." That proposal was rejected by others, including his fellow Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry, in a "Meet the Press" interview a week earlier.

Kennedy noted yesterday that US military officials, in testimony before Congress last week, announced that 15,000 troops whose Iraq deployment had been extended to protect the elections would be sent home "like I had suggested."

Interviewer Tim Russert also pressed Kennedy about his criticism of Bush's proposal to create private Social Security accounts that would be invested in the stock market. Bush has not said how the government would fund the plan.

Russert questioned Kennedy's contention that Social Security is not in a "crisis," as Bush has said, reciting a list of 21 other issues Kennedy has said were crises, from the fish industry to Section 8 vouchers. Noting that the Social Security Trust Fund will begin to draw down in 2018 and will be exhausted in several more decades, Russert asked Kennedy what he would do to fix the system if Bush's plan was wrong.

Kennedy suggested that the system could be made solvent by rolling back part of Bush's tax cuts instead of making them permanent, as the president has urged.