McCain outlines his plan for war in Iraq

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain predicted Thursday that most U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by the end of his first term, leaving behind a fragile but functioning democracy.

“The Iraq war has been won” by January 2013, McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a speech outlining what he hoped to accomplish in his first four years.

A smaller core of U.S. troops in non-combat roles would remain in Iraq, McCain said in Columbus.

The vision for a U.S. presence in Iraq that McCain sketched isn’t appreciably different from that promised for months by his Democratic opponents. But unlike Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, McCain still hasn’t put a timetable on when he would begin combat troop reductions. He told reporters after the speech that would depend on when progress toward victory was made.

McCain has been under attack for weeks by Democrats and liberal interest groups for his many previous remarks that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 100 years or more. Although McCain made clear that he envisioned that presence in a nonhostile environment — much as U.S. troops remain in South Korea more than 50 years after the Korean war ended — his opponents clearly hope that his word choice will hurt McCain with a war-weary electorate.

“First McCain said he is fine with a U.S. presence in Iraq for 100 years,” said Eli Pariser, an executive director of MoveOn.org, the anti-war group whose political wing produced an anti-McCain ad. “Now he is saying U.S. troops may come home in five years. First he said he was opposed to setting a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals. Now he favors it.”

McCain offered no roadmap to victory.

“He laid out what his dream was ...without offering one single solitary concrete way explaining how he’d do the things he stated,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

McCain also predicted that the threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan would be “greatly reduced but not eliminated” and that Osama bin Laden would be killed or captured.

McCain envisioned all his major proposals working out swimmingly, such as robust economic growth thanks to extending the Bush tax cuts, lowering the corporate tax rate, phasing out the Alternative Minimum Tax and signing more free trade agreements.

Mindful of the scandals and investigations that engulfed the Clinton and Bush administrations, McCain also promised “a new standard for transparency and accountability,” including weekly news conferences and regular visits to Congress to take questions from members of both parties, much as the prime minister of Great Britain does in the House of Commons.

Democrats mocked McCain’s promise of transparency, noting that his multi-millionaire wife, Cindy McCain, refuses to release her tax returns.