McCain: Iraq victory in sight

Republican John McCain again insisted victory in Iraq “is finally in sight.” So why, asked Democrat Barack Obama, does his presidential opponent still oppose a timetable for withdrawing American forces.

The argument over the unpopular war — a key issue separating the candidates — flared again Monday after McCain spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, a friendly audience given his service as a Navy fighter pilot and prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Overshadowing the back and forth this week is the mounting speculation about who Obama will choose to be his vice presidential running mate. An announcement is expected within days. Obama is believed to have narrowed the field to Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. His vanquished rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, also remained a possibility.

The Iraq war, the top election issue before the presidential contest began, has given way to voter concerns over a stumbling economy that shows no signs of rebounding as Democrats head into their national convention next week. Republicans gather to nominate McCain the following week.

McCain, a four-term Arizona senator, said the victory he envisioned still could be “squandered by hasty withdrawal and arbitrary timelines. And this is one of many problems in the shifting positions of my opponent, Sen. Obama.”

Obama issued a sharp retort, questioning McCain’s sincerity in support of Iraqi sovereignty — one of the Bush administration’s goals in the war McCain heavily promoted in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“It is hard to understand how Sen. McCain can at once proclaim his support for the sovereign government of Iraq, and then stubbornly defy their expressed support for a timeline to remove our combat brigades from their country,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

“John McCain is intent on spending $10 billion a month on an open-ended war, while Barack Obama thinks we should bring this war to a responsible end and invest in our pressing needs here at home.”

McCain insists U.S. troop withdrawals be dependent on conditions on the ground in Iraq. Obama, with agreement of the Baghdad government, says American forces should be gone in 2010.

Obama, who has been put on the defensive by a series of attacks on his character, experience and readiness for the presidency, has been responding to the McCain accusations blow for blow.

The Illinois senator has sought to defang McCain’s attempt to make the 2008 presidential contest a referendum on Obama while trying to duck his associations with the unpopular President Bush.

In a bid to counter McCain claims about Obama’s thin resume and short national political profile, the freshman Illinois senator was widely expected to reach for a fellow Democrat with solid foreign affairs and security credentials when he finally names a vice presidential running mate this week.

Among the possible choices is Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who undertook a weekend trip to Russian-occupied Georgia. Biden, who challenged Obama in the Democratic primaries, has been in the Senate since 1972 and is one of its foreign policy deans.

Other top contenders for the No. 2 spot on Obama’s ticket, both with far less heft than Biden, are Bayh, a middle-of-the-road Indiana senator with an extensive Democratic pedigree, and Kaine, who leads a Republican-leaning state Obama needs to put in his column on Nov. 4.

McCain, also, needs to name a running mate.

Last week, he floated the name of former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who could help in the big industrial state but would face heavy opposition from the Republican base, which is hotly at odds with Ridge’s support for abortion rights. Other top contenders for McCain include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

McCain's blind spot on Iraq, Vietnam

IS IT ANY wonder that John McCain was feeling a tad neglected? There was Barack Obama on a nine-day trip through eight countries with three network anchors, and all John got was a lousy T-shirt. Or to be more exact, all he got was a ride in George H.W. Bush's golf cart and a rejection slip from a New York Times op-ed editor.

Even McCain's inner circle began to get snarky. They keep referring to Obama as "The One" and complain that the maverick boytoy McCain has been replaced in the media's heart by a new trophy wife named Barack. The straight talker's website even posted a video of "The Media is in Love," a montage of fawning sound bites against a soundtrack of Frankie Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You."

Never mind that Frankie's "Eyes" was a No. 2 hit in 1967, a year when Obama was 6. For some reason, McCain's cultural references have a sell-by date of 1970. But it wasn't just Frankie Valli that makes me feel that the Republican is locked into a 40-year-old time frame. It's the debate about Iraq itself.

Gary Hart once said, "In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War." For a long time, the former prisoner of war has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. Americans lost the war because they lost their will. He's thought more about the sorry last chapter of that war than its foolish beginning.

So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war's origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion. McCain jumped the shark when he accused Obama of wanting to win an election even if it meant losing a war. But even before that intemperate charge, he said something equally damning: "The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do, we would have lost."

McCain starts the historical clock running after the invasion and even after the surge. For all his complaints about the media, he's been able to focus the Iraq debate on the surge's success. He has said repeatedly, "I'm proud that I was right. That's what judgment is about. That's why I'm qualified to lead."

But what if "we had done what Obama wanted to do" in 2002, when he was a lowly state senator and an opponent of invasion? We wouldn't have roared into this disaster.

I am well aware that we cannot rewind the past. We focus now on the least catastrophic exit plan. When the Iraqi prime minister and Obama agree on a timetable, I synchronize my watch. But it's still fair to measure a candidate by his view on our entrance to this war.

The current president has never admitted that we invaded Iraq on false premises or phony preemptives or fictitious weapons of mass destruction. Bush will breeze home to Texas without a modicum of guilt. Do we want another president like that?

Let's go back to a McCain op-ed that did run in The New York Times before the invasion: "Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts . . . could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war." Let's go back to an interview with Tim Russert when McCain was asked if he would still have gone to war even knowing there were no WMDs. "Yes," he answered without missing a beat. The only regret or anger expressed by McCain is that we didn't have enough troops earlier.

Finally, in the recent, rejected op-ed, McCain said that by advocating timetables for withdrawal, Obama was "emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the 'Mission Accomplished' banner prematurely." Dear John: Wasn't the "worst mistake of the Bush administration" launching the invasion at all?

This is not a summer of love. Frankie Valli is no longer a teen idol. Iraq is not Vietnam. But Americans are in a $10 billion-a-month war with more than 4,000 dead and 30,000 wounded. We've watched the current president deny and deny that he was wrong in invading Iraq. If there's a bottom-line, rock-solid qualification for being the next president, it's a candidate who acknowledges just how badly we were misled. So far, Obama's The (Only) One.

McCain denies he misstated timing of Iraq surge

Republican John McCain is pushing back against Democratic criticism that he misstated the timing of the buildup of troops ordered by President Bush in early 2007. He says parts of the new strategy began months earlier.

The Arizona senator has told reporters during a stop at a super market in Bethlehem, Pa., that what the Bush administration calls "the surge" was actually "made up of a number of components." McCain says some components of the surge began before Bush ordered more U.S. troops into Iraq.

McCain says U.S. Col. Sean MacFarland started carrying out elements of a new counterinsurgency strategy as early as December 2006.