Iraq Not Top In Obama¿s War On Terror Agenda
The Obama campaign wants to talk about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Afghanistan is sliding toward chaos,” said Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice on a conference call last week responding to a report that Al Qaeda had reconstituted a safe haven inside Pakistan. “We have five times as many troops in Iraq as we do in Afghanistan, yet John McCain wants to keep our troops in Iraq indefinitely.”
In June, at least 27 American soldiers died in Afghanistan compared to at least 29 in Iraq, according to the Associated Press, and troop deaths including international forces in Afghanistan exceeded those in Iraq for the first time.
In Iraq, the surge in troop levels—which McCain was an early advocate for and Obama opposed—has been accompanied by a dramatic drop in the number of American and Iraqi casualties. McCain has called his opponent’s opposition to the surge a failure in judgment, and Republicans hope that they’ve framed the issue so that Obama can’t acknowledge much progress in Iraq without backing away from his plan to withdraw American troops within 16 months. "I don't think there's any question that Barack Obama should change his plan in Iraq,” said Rep. Eric Cantor last Wednesday on behalf of the McCain campaign. "He is now clinging to a very ideological commitment."
In part to avoid that trap, Obama has emphasized a foreign policy that hinges on defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The whole reason why Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq in 2002, as he said back then, is that he said it would be a dangerous diversion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and the people who hit us on 9-11," Rice said in a Wednesday interview with Politico. "And it has exactly the effect that he predicted and feared.”
Politically, claiming Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror allows him to credit the surge for improving conditions while continuing to call for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, and to blame Bush and McCain for “taking their eye off the Al Qaeda ball,” as Rice put it on the conference call, in the war on terror.
Later this summer, he’ll visit both Iraq and Afghanistan, in part to keep the two countries interlocked in the minds of voters and reporters.
“I’ve always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed,” Obama said on Thursday, the day before the 4th of July weekend, when voters tend to be more concerned with backyard barbeques than world affairs. “And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers promptly sprung the trap, applauding the shift from Obama’s sharper primary rhetoric while all but calling Obama a liar for making the shift:
"There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it," said Rogers. "Now that Barack Obama has changed course and proven his past positions to be just empty words, we would like to congratulate him for accepting John McCain's principled stand on this critical national security issue."
Obama has side-stepped by arguing that “the ground” must also include Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the same day that he recalibrated his tone on Iraq, his campaign held a conference call to highlight Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen’s statement to reporters the previous day that “I don't have the troops I can reach for” to deploy in Afghanistan, in part because so many soldiers are deployed in Iraq.
"You cannot have the world's largest intelligence collection effect in Iraq without meaning you have fewer resources in Afghanistan," said Bruce Riedl, a former CIA officer and Obama adviser, on the Monday call.
McCain has argued that Iraq is central to the war on terror, not a drag on it, and that NATO should be able to provide the required troops in Afghanistan—something the Bush administration has had limited success convincing the alliance to provide.
“Senator McCain supports General Petraeus’s view that Iraq is the central front in the war in terror. That doesn’t mean that Afghanistan and Pakistan aren’t incredibly important, but to suggest that we write off Iraq … is just unsound,” said McCain campaign senior foreign policy adviser Kori Schake. “And it’s part of a series of judgments that Senator Obama and his campaign have made that have just been wrong.”
"Why haven’t we captured Osama bin Laden?" asked Obama campaign foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough in a conference call nominally held to denounce McCain adviser Charlie Black’s statement that a terror attack on U.S soil “would be a big advantage” to John McCain. “Why does Al Qaeda have a sanctuary in Pakistan? … Why haven’t we finished the fight against the Taliban?"
It’s not clear that voters are concerned with the answer. According to the Washington Post/ABC News poll, the war in Iraq still is still the top issue for 19 percent of voters—more than any other issue, but down significantly from previous years—while only four percent identified terrorism and national security as their top concern. A CNN poll released last week showed voters’ concerns about terrorism at a post-9/11 low, and a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll conducted in mid-March asking which of a list of potential threats voters were most concerned with showed the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan as next to last.
Nor is it clear that voters agree with the campaigns’ sense of which issues benefit which candiate. A June 15 ABC News/Washington Post poll shows voters evenly split as to which candidate they trust to handle “the war in Iraq,” while McCain leads by six points on ‘international affairs” and 14 points on “The U.S. campaign against terrorism.” The war in Iraq itself, however, remains deeply unpopular, with just 30 percent of adults favoring it, and 68 percent opposing it in a CNN poll conducted in late June.
As the McCain camp knows, voters’ concerns can shift quickly. Black’s much criticized prediction that a terror attack would benefit his candidate, which bluntly acknowledged the conventional wisdom within both parties, were apparently brought to mind by a question about the assassination of Pakistani politician and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, which he called an “unfortunate event" before adding that "but [McCain’s] knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us."
While the Obama camp seized on Black’s remarks to accuse McCain of practicing what one surrogate called “the politics of fear,” it also stressed Obama’s willingness to engage on what’s traditionally been considered the right-wing turf of national security and foreign affairs. Spokesman Bill Burton began his response to Black by saying, “Barack Obama welcomes a debate about terrorism with John McCain, who has fully supported the Bush policies that have taken our eye off of al Qaeda, failed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, and made us less safe.”
Last August, Obama was accused of naiveté and worse by both Democrats and Republicans when he answered a question about a then-recent National Intelligence Estimate that called the presence of Al Qaeda in the Pakistani border areas the greatest threat to American national security, by saying that "If we have actionable intelligence about highvalue terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
McCain seemed to reference that dust-up in February, when he called Obama “an inexperienced candidate who once suggested invading our ally, Pakistan.”
Obama, though, has held fast to his stance, which his camp argues now reflects American operating policy. “To my amazement John McCain is now saying that we shouldn’t go after Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan if the Pakistanis are unwilling or unable to do so,” Rice told Politico.
“Senator McCain, he’s running for Commander-in-Chief of Iraq,” Rice went on, while Obama “believes we need to focus on the full panoply of threats we face.”