THE US: John Kerry yesterday planned to attack President Bush's plan to withdraw 70,000 US troops from Europe and Asia which the Democratic presidential candidate sees as a threat to national security, campaign aides said.
The Democratic nominee would also be saying that the military realignment plan sent the wrong message to countries such as North Korea, where the US has been working to deter Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programmes, the aides said on condition of anonymity.
Mr Kerry was to make the remarks in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) convention in Ohio, a political battleground in the November 2nd presidential election. Mr Bush addressed the same group on Monday, when he announced plans to move the 70,000 troops in a shift of focus from Cold War enemies Russia and China.
Mr Bush said the withdrawal would create a more flexible military, improve the lives of soldiers and better position the US to fight emerging threats. The plan, to be implemented over 10 years, would not affect the 125,000 US troops now deployed in Iraq.
Mr Kerry was to argue the plan "could impair the nation's security, particularly in addressing North Korea's nuclear programme and in fighting the war on terror," according to the aides, who provided excerpts from his speech.
There are more than 100,000 US service personnel in Europe, about 70,000 of them in Germany.
Another 100,000 are in the Asia-Pacific region, the majority in South Korea and Japan.
The Kerry campaign has attacked the redeployment plan as politically-motivated and said it would undermine the US relationship with NATO.
In his speech to the VFW, Mr Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, would dispute Mr Bush's claim to be "getting things done" for US veterans, the second time in recent weeks he has dismissed one of the Republican incumbent's campaign slogans.
"The job will be done when there are no homeless veterans on the streets of America," he said in the excerpts. "The job will be done when more than 320,000 veterans no longer are waiting for decisions on disability claims and another 100,000 are not awaiting appeals decisions." The four-term senator from Massachusetts also criticised Mr Bush for his "go-it-alone" foreign policy.
Although Mr Kerry voted to authorise the use of force against Iraq, he has since said he would have proceeded differently from Mr Bush: first exhausting diplomatic avenues, bringing in US allies instead of alienating them and ensuring he had a plan to win the peace.
Mr Kerry also has set a goal of bringing home a "significant" number of the US troops in Iraq within his first six months in office, if conditions on the ground allowed it.
Mr Bush has accused his rival of U-turns on Iraq and said setting a timetable to pull out troops sows doubt about US willingness to complete its task.