SAN FRANCISCO - Veterans of the Iraq war are mobilizing for Tuesday"s elections nationwide--mostly on the side of Democrats critical of President George W. Bush"s handling of the war.

"Normally, the military and military families lean conservative, especially in a time of war, so to see these kinds of activities is very telling about the situation we"re in now," said Tim Goodrich, a former Air Force pilot from Buffalo, New York, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Goodrich co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, has joined other disenchanted veterans to form a political action committee called Iraq Veterans for Progress.

"We support candidates who want to end the war, against their opponents who are allied with the Bush administration"s strategy of "stay the course"," Goodrich told OneWorld. "We help them win by sending them unemployed Iraq veterans to campaign for them. We pay their salary and help get our message out."

Among the races Iraq Veterans for Progress is involved in is a contested House of Representatives seat in Ohio currently occupied by Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, who gained national attention by calling decorated former Marine and fellow legislator John Murtha a coward because the Pennsylvania Democrat had advocated that the U.S. military withdraw from Iraq.

Schmidt repeatedly has voted against veterans" health care and against reductions in military families" taxes, according to Iraq Veterans for Progress. The group is backing Democrat Victoria Wulsin and is paying for veteran Thomas Cassidy to work on her campaign.

According to the group"s Web site, Cassidy "was born and raised in rural southern Ohio and joined the military on a whim to escape the boredom young people face in small towns."

He served in the Army"s 1st Infantry Division from July 2001 to July 2005, including a year in the heart of Iraq"s so-called Sunni Triangle, northwest of Baghdad.

"Thomas returned home in hopes of forgetting all he had been a part of," his biographical note on the Web site reads. "However, the levels to which American civilians have been misled have re-ignited his passion to make a change and bring the troops home."

Among groups dedicated to get-the-vote-out efforts ahead of the Nov. 7 polls, Iraq Veterans for Progress is among those closest to the grass roots but it is hardly the largest.

VoteVets, based on New York City"s Park Avenue, is deluging contested Senate races in Virginia, Montana, and Pennsylvania with more than $100,000 worth of television advertisements in an effort to unseat pro-war Republican incumbents.

Republican candidates accuse VoteVets of being a Democratic Party front group, a charge the group denies.

"The DNC [Democratic National Committee] does not dictate our policy or our strategies," retired Major Paul Hackett told OneWorld. After serving tours in Ramadi and Fallujah, Iraq, he returned to his native state of Ohio and ran for Congress in a special election in 2005. Hackett stunned many by winning more than 48 percent of the vote in a district where George W. Bush had received nearly two-thirds of the vote in the presidential election just 10 months earlier.

"Our ideas come from those who are affiliated with the group," Hackett said. "Some of us have more say than others, but we are certainly not a mouthpiece for the DNC. We"re using it as an opportunity to get politicians to take note and listen and I think it"s important."

The GOP also has put together groups of its own with veterans out front and political operatives behind the scenes. A group called Vets for Freedom is running television advertisements against anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont in Connecticut, for example.

According to an investigative report published in the Buffalo News, Vets for Freedom was started by Taylor Goss, a former Bush spokesman who also managed the president"s public relations during the recount of votes in Florida in the 2000 election. William Kristol, founder and editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard, and Republican strategist Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, also are advisors.

The non-profit Center for Media and Democracy found links between Vets for Freedom and the public relations firm that created the Swift Boat ad campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

The research and advocacy group calls Vets for Freedom the "equivalent of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Republican 527 committee whose attack advertisements in battleground states helped sink Kerry in the 2004 presidential race by smearing him as a phony war hero and a traitor to his country." Both campaigns have worked with the Republican-affiliated Donatelli PR firm but the group denies they have anything to do with the Republican Party.

Like Democrat Hackett, Vets for Freedom co-founder and former Marine Lieutenant Wade Zirkle denied any formal links to either party.

"If we were a Republican front group, we wouldn"t be running advertisements for [independent] Joe Lieberman," Zirkle said, referring to the former Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful from Connecticut whom Lamont unseated as the party"s pick to run in Tuesday"s midterm election.

"That"s not something that Republicans do. They get involved in races where they want Republicans to win. I think it"s pretty clear that we are what we say we are, a bipartisan group that concerns itself with one issue, the war on terror, specifically Iraq," Zirkle added.

Rafael ""Raf"" Noboa, a seven-year veteran of the U.S. Army, said he was ""torn"" over groups like Zirkle"s.

When Noboa returned from a tour of duty in Iraq"s Sunni Triangle, he became active in the anti-war movement. He worked on Ned Lamont"s primary campaign earlier this year and helped found Iraq Veterans for Progress.

"If you"re going to have folks like me who are against the Iraq war, then obviously you"re going to have random guys on the other side," Noboa said.

"The problem,"" he added, ""is that these guys help legitimate what is an illegitimate enterprise. It"s an illegitimate enterprise politically and an illegitimate enterprise morally. I"m not a fan."