Obama, McCain clash on Iraq strategy

Sen. John McCain on Tuesday ridiculed Sen. Barack Obama for scrubbing his campaign Web site of past criticisms about the U.S. troop “surge” into Iraq, and lashed his Democratic presidential opponent for laying out strategies on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before consulting with military leaders on the ground.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama slammed his Republican opponent as having only a “strategy for staying in Iraq,” and declared that “the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq - and it never was.” His assertion, however, runs counter to the view of the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom the senator praised.

For a second straight day, the two candidates went toe to toe on Iraq and Afghanistan, this time laying out comprehensive strategies for each. While the two agreed that more troops need to be deployed in Afghanistan - and both criticized President Bush’s handling of the war there - Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama differed sharply on Iraq, and neither budged from his hard-line stance.

“I strongly stand by my plan to end this war,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington. “This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities that we could seize.”

The Illinois Democrat has called for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by summer 2010.

“George Bush and John McCain don’t have a strategy for success in Iraq; they have a strategy for staying in Iraq,” he said.

Mr. McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times since the war began and has visited Afghanistan several times, fired back in his own speech during a town-hall meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. He said Mr. Obama should wait until after he travels to Iraq, his first trip there in nearly three years, and makes his first visit to Afghanistan.

“He is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time,” the Arizona Republican said.

Needling the first-term senator, Mr. McCain - a lawmaker for 25 years and a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee - added, “In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy.”

Mr. McCain pointed out that both he and Mr. Obama “agreed the Bush administration had pursued a failed strategy [in Iraq] and that we had to change course,” but said they differed dramatically 18 months ago about how best to proceed.

“I called for a comprehensive new strategy - a surge of troops and counterinsurgency to win the war. Senator Obama disagreed. He opposed the surge, predicted it would increase sectarian violence, and called for our troops to retreat as quickly as possible,” said Mr. McCain, who staked his political future on the surge’s success last summer and plummeted in the polls before winning the Republican nominating contests.

“The surge has succeeded. And because of its success, the next president will inherit a situation in Iraq in which America’s enemies are on the run and our soldiers are beginning to come home,” he said in Albuquerque.

Meanwhile Tuesday, the McCain campaign sent reporters an e-mail headlined, in capital letters, “Barack Obama ‘refining’ Iraq position on own Website.” The dispatch cited a New York Daily News report that the Obama campaign had removed from his Web site the statements that he would “immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq” and that the surge of more than 20,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was “The Problem.”

“The surge is not working,” Mr. Obama’s old site stated. The page posted Sunday night said there is an “improved security situation” in Iraq, but makes no mention of the surge, which even top Democratic leaders have acknowledged reduced violence and restored security to the nation.

Mr. Obama had repeatedly rejected the surge, saying shortly after Mr. Bush announced it in January 2007: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. … In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

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