COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. ? After 20 years in the Air Force and Bronze Star service during the 1991 Gulf War, Democrat Jay Fawcett decided to come home and run for Congress, largely out of disgust with the way American troops were being used in Iraq.

“I think it’s just gotten to the point where a significant number of us who’ve served are looking at this administration particularly – and Congress doesn’t get off the hook – and saying, ‘What’re you doing? What’s the plan?”‘ he said.

Fawcett is part of a large and possibly unprecedented number of former soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines running for Congress this year.

About 40 of the candidates are Republicans, while at least 55 are Democrats. By one count, at least 11 veterans of the Iraq war or Afghanistan are hoping to get elected to the House or Senate, all but one of them Democrats.

The fighting Democrats, as some call themselves, say their military experience could give them the credibility to criticize the war without being dismissed out of hand by the GOP as naive and weak on defense, as the Bush administration has often done.

Former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., who lost both legs and an arm while serving in Vietnam, said the Iraq war veterans running as Democrats will offer “a direct rebuttal” to the administration on the Iraq war.

“This administration, come April, will be going into the fourth year of this war after the president said three weeks into it ‘Major combat over, mission accomplished, bring them on,”‘ Cleland said. “You tell me who’s out of touch. It’s not these Iraqi veterans that are coming back and saying, ‘This is not the way it was on the ground there, and I’m going to do something to change this.'”

Republicans could have a difficult time countering opposition to the administration’s war plan – or the war itself – from veteran-Democrats, said Gary Jacobson, a congressional scholar at the University of California at San Diego.

“Popular sentiment is not terribly pro-war now, and there’s lots of doubts about the administration’s honesty and the purposes of the war,” he said. “So if you have a veteran come back and start trashing the war, that’s a problem for Republicans.”