WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republican presidential hopeful John McCain Monday warned that plans by his Democratic rivals to withdraw from Iraq were "reckless" as the US general running the war prepared to testify to Congress.
McCain sharpened his attacks on dueling Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and argued that thanks to President George W. Bush's troop surge strategy, daily life in Iraq was approaching normality.
The Arizona senator and both Democrats will be closely watched Tuesday when General David Petraeus and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker testify on the progress in the war before two Senate committees.
McCain, who has mortgaged his presidential hopes to the unpopular war, went on the offensive against promises by Clinton and Obama to start pulling US troops out of Iraq.
"I do not believe that anyone should make promises as a candidate for president that they cannot keep if elected," McCain said in a speech in Kansas.
"To promise a withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, regardless of the calamitous consequences to the Iraqi people, our most vital interests, and the future of the Middle East, is the height of irresponsibility. It is a failure of leadership," he said.
"We must once again reject, as we did in early 2007, the calls for a reckless and irresponsible withdrawal of our forces just at the moment when they are succeeding," McCain said in a speech in Kansas.
Clinton and Obama both argue that Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of an improvement in conditions during the surge to forge political reconciliation.
Obama hit back at McCain, accusing him of wanting an "open ended" commitment to Iraq, and arguing that US policy had failed to force Iraqi leaders to reconcile and strained the US military.
"John McCain was wrong about the war from the beginning, he's wrong to call for more resources in Iraq while the American people are struggling, and he's wrong to support a 100-year occupation of a country that needs to take responsibility for its own future," Obama said in a written statement.
"No amount of tough talk will change the Bush-McCain record of poor judgment, or bring us one day closer to ending a war that is not making us safer."
Clinton said McCain's policy in Iraq would mean "four more years of the Bush-Cheney-McCain policy of continuing to police a civil war while the threats to our national security, our economy, and our standing in the world mount."
"We simply cannot give the Iraqi government an endless blank check. It is time to end this war as quickly, as responsibly, and as safely as possible. That has been my mission in the Senate and it will be my mission starting on day one as president."
Obama strongly opposed the war before he became a senator, and has faulted Clinton for voting in 2002 to authorize the invasion.
Both Obama and Clinton have seized on a remark by McCain that he could envisage a US peacekeeping presence like those in Japan and South Korea in Iraq for 100 years if US soldiers are no longer being killed.
The McCain campaign accuses both Democrats of distorting the words of the Arizonan, a critic of the Bush administration's early stewardship of the war, who has however emerged as a strong supporter of the troop surge.
"The dramatic reduction in violence has opened the way for a return to something approaching normal political and economic life for the average Iraqi," McCain said.
"There is no doubt about the basic reality in Iraq: we are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success."
Clinton was meanwhile shaking off the latest blow to her campaign, after her top strategist Mark Penn quit over a firestorm sparked by his lobbying work on a trade deal between the United States and Colombia which she opposes.
The gruff political operative had been blamed by some other Clinton insiders for her failure to quash Obama's challenge, and for a message which cast her as a voice of experience, allowing her rival to claim the mantle of change.
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