Findings mirror campaign views in ’04, he says. From the Boston Globe:
In the heat of the 2004 presidential campaign, Democratic nominee John Kerry declared that President Bush “should convene a summit of the world’s powers and Iraq’s neighbors” to help stabilize the country.
“Second,” Kerry urged on Sept. 20, 2004, “the president must get serious about training Iraqi security forces.”
Shortly thereafter, the president derided Kerry’s call for a regional summit, saying, “I’ve been to a lot of summits. My friends, a summit is not a plan.”
And at a press conference with then-Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi , Bush maintained that “we continue to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces,” claiming that the Iraqi army was already “half complete.”But this week, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group determined that Bush must immediately hold a regional summit and sharply increase training to salvage the US mission in Iraq. And in receiving the report, Bush called the ideas “very interesting,” vowing to “act in a timely fashion.”
Now, Kerry, who is considering a second run for the presidency, views the study group’s findings — others of which also mirror his own prescriptions from two years ago — as evidence that he was on the right track in 2004.
Kerry commented, “That’s what I was pressing in ’04, and that is what I am pressing today,” and said the Bush administration ” has wasted two years with slogans while there were real policies on the table that they could have pursued in a bipartisan manner.”
He said that when he first read the Iraq Study Group report, “My initial reaction was, ‘At last the Republicans are put in a place where they can’t play politics with this.’ “