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WASHINGTON: Democrat Barack Obama, bidding to shut
down scornful attacks on his White House credentials by Republican
rival John McCain, on Monday said 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 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 fund-raiser 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.
--AFP
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