McCain, Obama spar over al-Qaida presence in Iraq

One superdelegate has switched support from
Clinton to Obama.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

COLUMBUS — John McCain and Barack Obama engaged in a hard-edged, sarcastic back-and-forth Wednesday over al-Qaida and the war in Iraq, highlighting a fundamental difference in their world views and possibly foreshadowing the fall campaign.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, went after a comment Obama had made Tuesday night, when he’d said that if al-Qaida surged in Iraq after a U.S. withdrawal, as president he might send military forces back in.

“I have some news: Al-Qaida is in Iraq,” McCain bitingly told an audience in Tyler, Texas. “It’s called, ‘al-Qaida in Iraq.’”

Obama’s comment, which he made during the debate with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, was “pretty remarkable,” McCain said.

But Obama, appearing at Ohio State University, showed he did not appreciate being lectured to by the Arizona senator.

“So I heard that Sen. McCain said this morning that he had some news for me — al-Qaida is in Iraq,” he said.

“Well first of all, I know that, and that’s why I’ve said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets,” Obama said. “But I have some news for John McCain: There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.”

The exchange highlighted what could become a seminal issue in the general election campaign between McCain and Obama, who is the Democratic front-runner.

The exchange between the two also served to further subdue Clinton’s role in the presidential sweepstakes as she looks to Tuesday’s primaries in Ohio and Texas to try to stop Obama’s momentum. The two-term New York senator held an invitation-only economic forum in Zanesville, in southeastern Ohio, featuring such allies as Govs. Ted Strickland of Ohio and Jon Corzine of New Jersey and former Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, but made no mention of the Iraq flap.

Clinton’s campaign also suffered a setback when, as expected, civil rights movement icon and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention, switched allegiances from the New York senator to the Illinois senator.

Obama has made a core campaign theme of his long-held opposition to the war in Iraq, which was authorized before he entered the Senate. He has chided his Democratic rival, Clinton, for voting in 2002 for the Iraq war resolution — a vote she now says was a mistake based on faulty intelligence.

McCain has been a staunch supporter of U.S. involvement in Iraq as a way to put a check on international terrorism. McCain also has been an ardent supporter of the U.S. military surge. He has attacked Democratic calls for a timetable for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, contending that was a timetable for surrender.

“If we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said of al-Qaida. “They’d be taking a country and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”

But Obama took one of McCain’s stock campaign lines — that he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the “Gates of Hell” — and said “so far all [McCain’s] done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that has cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars.” Obama vowed a renewed effort against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border “like we should have been doing in the first place.”

“That’s the news, John McCain,” Obama said.

With only days remaining before next Tuesday’s primaries that will likely decide the fate of her campaign, Clinton told reporters aboard her chartered plane en route to Zanesville that she would focus her message on ways to improve Ohio’s economy.

“We’re sliding into a recession and the price of everything is going up at the same time,” Clinton said. “This is a very difficult terrain to try to navigate through.”

Clinton said she was pleased by her performance against Obama in Tuesday night’s debate in Cleveland — the last before next week’s primaries and, with 7.8 million viewers, MSNBC’s highest-rated broadcast ever — and said talk that she failed to deliver a knockout should be reserved for a “prize fight, that’s not a debate.”