Obama intensifies attacks on Clinton’s, McCain’s plans for Iraq

Sen. Barack Obama, turning up the rhetoric on foreign policy, said today that his two presidential rivals talk tough on national security but make decisions that embolden America’s enemies in the war against terrorism.

In a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Obama faulted rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for voting to authorize the war and for suggesting that Obama’s call for a “careful” drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq shows he is waffling about bringing American troops home.

“Sen. Clinton has tried to use my position to score political points, suggesting that I am somehow less committed to ending the war,” Obama said. “She makes this argument despite the fact that she has taken the same position in the past. So ask yourself: Who do you trust to end a war – someone who opposed the war from the beginning, or someone who started opposing it when they started preparing a run for president?”

As for Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has clinched the GOP nomination, Obama chided him for misspeaking Tuesday in Jordan when he blamed Iran for training Al Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, the administration has voiced concern that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training Shiite extremists in Iraq, not militants from Al Qaeda, a Sunni group.

“Just yesterday, we heard Sen. McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and Al Qaeda,” Obama said. “Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no Al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades.”

Obama also fired back at Clinton, McCain and at President Bush for belittling as naive his call for tougher action against terrorists in Pakistan’s border region.

“Sen. Clinton, Sen. McCain and President Bush have all distorted and derided this position, suggesting that I would invade or bomb Pakistan. This is politics, pure and simple,” Obama said. “The same three individuals who now criticize me for supporting a targeted strike on the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, are the same three individuals that supported an invasion of Iraq – a country that had nothing to do with 9/11,” he said.

Obama chided McCain for his applause-winning speech line that, if elected, he will “chase Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell” to bring him to justice. And he faulted Clinton for an ad campaign suggesting that the New York senator has the experience needed to answer a crisis phone call at 3 a.m. in the White House.

“We have a security gap when candidates say they will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but refuse to follow him where he actually goes,” said Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois. “What we need in our next commander in chief is not a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality or empty rhetoric about 3 a.m. phone calls. What we need is a pragmatic strategy that focuses on fighting our real enemies.”

Clinton delivered a series of speeches on Iraq this week in which she offered plans to begin withdrawing troops within 60 days of becoming president. “I’ve been outlining this week plans as to what we can and must do,” she said in a speech today, pledging to scale back U.S. forces “in a responsible and careful manner.”

Blasting the Iraqi political leadership for not doing its part, Clinton said: “We have given them the precious gift of freedom. We cannot win their civil war.”

McCain, traveling in the Middle East, issued a statement saying that on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, “America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.” Calling this year’s security gains “dramatic and undeniable,” McCain said that “Americans should be proud that they led the way in removing a vicious, predatory dictator and opening the possibility of a free and stable Iraq.”

Later, after reviewing Obama’s remarks, McCain’s campaign issued a statement hitting back.

“Sen. Obama says that ending the war will not be easy, that ‘there will be dangers involved.’ Yet, in that patented way of his, he declines to name those dangers,” senior strategist Mark Salter said.

Arguing that Al Qaeda must be defeated, Salter added that “Sen. Obama is apparently unaware” of the fact that Iran trains Shiite extremists and arms Sunni extremists. He said Obama mischaracterized his position by saying that McCain first opposed reducing U.S. troops because violence was too high, and now because the tactics of the surge had forced violence down.

“Deprive Gen. [David] Petraeus of the resources and manpower to employ those tactics, or worse, leave Iraq altogether, and our strategy will collapse,” Salter said. “That is national security 101.”

johanna.neuman@latimes.com