Obama plans pre-election trip to Iraq, Afghanistan
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democrat Barack Obama, bidding to shut down scornful attacks on his White House credentials by Republican rival John McCain, said Monday he plans a pre-election trip to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senator Obama, newly endorsed by former vice president Al Gore, also went after McCain on the economy as the candidates intensified a war of words on the long march to November's vote.
"As I've said, I'm interested in visiting Iraq and Afghanistan before the election," said Obama, who has been vilified by McCain for visiting Iraq only once, in January 2006.
Senator McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times, said he had no doubt that the US military "surge" was working and that Obama's plans to pull most combat troops out of the troubled nation would trigger "chaos and genocide."
"I am convinced that we are on the path to victory. And that victory means Americans come home, but they come home with honor in victory, not in defeat," McCain told reporters in Virginia.
Obama, who has attacked McCain's trips as glorified photo opportunities, argues the real front of the "war on terror" is Afghanistan and that the US involvement in Iraq has been a diplomatic and financial disaster.
In any case, opinion polls suggest that most Americans are more concerned with the faltering economy than with Iraq as they reel from an epidemic of home foreclosures, job losses and skyrocketing gasoline prices.
Obama drew a link to the war as he outlined his plans to restore US competitiveness with a speech in Flint, in the rusting heart of Michigan's auto industry.
"We could have invested in innovation and rebuilt our crumbling roads and bridges, but instead we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and never been waged," he said.
"Instead of reaching for new horizons, (President) George Bush has put us in a hole, and John McCain's policies will keep us there."
Carly Fiorina, a top economic adviser to McCain and former head of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, said the Michigan speech was "an example of the contrast between Barack Obama's rhetoric and the reality of his record."
She attacked Obama's "protectionist" stance on free trade and said he offered discredited "big-government solutions" on education and healthcare that would do nothing for US competitiveness.
Obama returned to the issue of Iraq at a fundraiser in Detroit late Monday where he was introduced by Gore as the "next president of the United States."
He repeatedly praised the former vice-president, saying it was "a war that Al Gore understood should never have been authorized and never should have been waged," according to a pool report.
Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his campaign against global warming, had stayed neutral during the grueling primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But at the Detroit event the former Democratic party nominee said he would do whatever he could to ensure Obama won in November, as the United States "simply cannot afford to continue the policies of the last eight years for another four."
"Over the next four years, we are going to face many difficult challenges, including bringing our troops home from Iraq, fixing our economy, and solving the climate crisis," Gore said.
"Barack Obama is clearly the candidate best able to solve these problems and bring change to America."
The Obama campaign, rebuffing McCain's courtship of Clinton supporters, meanwhile lambasted the Republican's ties to Texas oilman Clayton "Claytie" Williams, who joked in 1990 that rape victims should "lie back and enjoy it."
Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan noted that McCain had Friday canceled a fundraising event at Williams's home, after media reports about the rape remark, but was refusing to return more than 300,000 dollars raised by him.
"The only thing more insulting than John McCain's willingness to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash raised by Claytie Williams is his attempt to get away with it by simply changing the venue of his fundraiser," Sevugan said.
McCain said that his plans to reschedule the fundraiser were "pretty much the sum" of the controversy, and declined to say whether it might hurt his standing with female voters.
