IOWA FALLS, Iowa — Illinois Sen. Barack Obama laughed off criticism from Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who said the U.S. presidential candidate's plans for Iraq "encourage those who wanted to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq."

"It's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started to attack me the day after I announced," Obama said yesterday. Obama formally announced his candidacy Saturday in Illinois.

Unless Howard sends 20,000 troops to join the 1,400 Australians now serving in Iraq, Obama said, "It's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."

Obama said at his campaign kickoff in Springfield, Ill., that one of the country's first priorities should be ending the war in Iraq. The senator has called for capping the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and then beginning to withdraw them on May 1. He wants a complete pullout of combat brigades by March 31, 2008.

Howard, a staunch Bush ally, said Obama's proposals would spell disaster for the Middle East.

"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard said Saturday on Australia's Nine Network television.

"If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

Over two days, tens of thousands of people turned out across Illinois and Iowa to see the freshly declared White House hopeful, spilling over city blocks and filling gymnasiums rafter-high with their red, white and blue posters and wide-eyed fervor.

They came to see history, many said, to launch the journey of the most formidable black presidential candidate the nation has witnessed. They shouted their affection and cheered the Democrat's call for a new style of politics — bigger, bolder and more audacious, to borrow from the title of his best-selling autobiography, than Americans have seen in a long while.

But, truth be told, there was little that was really new or different about the issues Obama raised in his maiden swing as a formal presidential candidate.

Washington gridlock. Poison politics. Overweening special interests. Poverty, poor schools and an expensive healthcare system. Candidates cluck over them every presidential election.

At each stop, Obama noted that he was against the war from the start, a distinction he drew with his chief rivals, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who initially backed the war before turning against it.

There was one notable misstep. In a speech at Iowa State University, Obama issued an indictment of how Washington dealt with Iraq: "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged — and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

He backtracked on the term "wasted" in an interview with the Des Moines Register, saying: "I was upset with myself. The sacrifices (troops) are making are unbelievable. I meant to say that those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy and diplomacy needed to be successful in Iraq."

The Associated Press, Gannett News Service and Washington Post contributed to this story.