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Biden's Anti-Iraq Surge Comments Could Be Part of McCain Attack Plan

(CBS)
From CBS News' John Bentley:

(SEDONA, ARIZ.) – One of John McCain's favorite lines of attack against Barack Obama is that he maintains Obama still hasn't admitted that the surge in Iraq was a success. Now that Joe Biden has been selected as Obama's VP at least partially because of his foreign policy experience, you can bet you'll be hearing a lot about Biden's low opinion of the surge strategy, which he called "doomed" and "a fantasy."

"The surge isn't going to work either tactically or strategically," Biden told the Boston Globe last summer. "Tactically it isn't going to work because ... our guys go in and secure a neighborhood, but because we don't have enough troops, we have to turn it over to the Iraqis, and they can't hold it or won't hold it."

Biden advocated dividing up the country into three parts based on ethnicity, something McCain strongly disagreed with.

"If you did the three different countries, basically what the Biden-Gelb proposal (is) as I understand it, one, you'd be drawing dividing lines in bedrooms in Baghdad because Sunni and Shia are married," McCain said. "The second thing is, the Turks have announced that they will not allow an independent Kurdish state."

As the U.S. begins to draw up a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq, McCain has credited the surge, led by Gen. David Petraeus, with the ability to talk about pulling troops out. Biden called Petraeus "dead flat wrong" on the surge and said an Iraqi government made up of Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds is "not going to happen."

All three of those groups are currently represented in the Iraqi government, although the security and stability in the country has been termed "fragile" by most observers there.

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