War vote gives candidates more to fight about

The war in Iraq spawned a political war of words Friday, after Congress approved a controversial $120-billion military spending measure opposed by the top Democratic presidential candidates and supported by the top Republican contenders.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) voted against the bill after a U.S. troop-withdrawal timetable was dropped as a requirement for continued war funding.

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) condemned the vote and urged antiwar supporters to join in Memorial Day weekend events protesting the war but supporting the troops. “No one else is going to end this war for us,” he said in an e-mail to supporters. “Bush will not listen. Congress will not fight. There’s no one left to lead the country now but we the people.”

Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who voted for the measure and has supported the war while criticizing its execution, blasted Clinton and Obama, saying their votes “may win favor with MoveOn and liberal primary voters, but it’s the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, also a Republican, joined in, saying the votes showed a “lack of leadership” by Clinton and Obama and were “a glaring example of an unrealistic and inexperienced worldview on national security.” Romney said the votes would “render them undependable in the eyes of the men and women of the United States military and the American people.”

Obama fired back: “Gov. Romney and Sen. McCain clearly believe the course we are on in Iraq is working, but I do not.

“This country is united in our support for our troops, but we also owe them a plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war,” Obama said.

“And if there ever was a reflection of that,” he added, “it’s the fact that Sen. McCain required a flack jacket, 10 armored Humvees, two Apache attack helicopters, and 100 soldiers with rifles by his side to stroll through a market in Baghdad just a few weeks ago.”

McCain responded with a slap at Obama’s experience and his grasp of military terminology. “While Sen. Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military leaders on the ground in Iraq lead me to believe that we must give this new strategy a chance to succeed, because the consequences of failure would be catastrophic to our nation’s security,” McCain said.

“By the way, Sen. Obama, it’s a ‘flak’ jacket, not a ‘flack’ jacket,” McCain added.

McCain, Romney and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani are fighting for support among conservative voters with whom the “support the troops” message is expected to resonate; Clinton, Obama and Edwards are seeking support from the antiwar Democratic base.

The Obama-McCain exchange followed a dust-up earlier in the week that began when Edwards told the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday that the “war on terror” was “a bumper sticker, not a plan,” drawing a sharp rebuke from Giuliani.

“When you go so far as to suggest that the global war on terror is a bumper sticker or slogan, it makes the point that I’ve been making over and over again: That the Democrats, or at least some of them, are in denial,” Giuliani told Fox News.

scott.martelle@latimes.com