WASHINGTON, 7 April 2008 — The US presidential campaign is likely to veer sharply back to the Iraq war this week when commander Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress to report on progress in the unpopular conflict now in its sixth year.
While the war has been pushed into the campaign background by the slumping American economy, Petraeus’s much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill tomorrow will place him in the Senate chambers of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.
Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain and Democrat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton sit on the Armed Services panel. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, is a member of the Foreign Relations committee.
Before the Iraq showdown in Washington, Obama and Clinton opened their campaigns in western states that will be among the last to hold primary contests. The Democratic contestants were battling for every last nominating convention delegate in a contest that was expected to continue through the last scheduled primaries on June 3 in South Dakota and Montana.
At the start of the primary season, Montana Democrats had little reason to expect that the presidential candidates would be paying much attention to their state’s primary in which only 17 delegates are at stake.
But on Saturday evening, both Clinton and Obama spoke at the state party’s annual dinner in Butte, which drew about 4,000 Democratic activists. Clinton was staying over in Montana to hold a town hall meeting in Missoula. A Gallup poll showed Obama with a slight lead nationally over Clinton in the Democratic presidential race, at 49 percent to 44 percent. The survey conducted April 1-3 had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Obama leads in the delegate count, 1,635-1,501, according to The Associated Press. Because of the way Democrats apportion delegates, Clinton is not likely to catch Obama even if she has a strong showing in the remaining 10 contests, including the 158 at stake in the next contest in Pennsylvania on April 22.
That leaves the race largely in the hands of the 800 so-called superdelegates — party leaders, lawmakers and officials who are not bound by state results when casting their vote.
McCain, who spent five and one-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, returned last month from his eighth trip to Iraq and pronounced the US troop “surge” a success.
Petraeus, who also is to report to US President George W. Bush, was expected to flesh out those successes in bringing down violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad. His views will inform the president’s decision on whether to place on hold the draw down of American forces after the 30,000-strong surge force is to have left by July.
Obama and Clinton both are vowing an end to the war, with competing plans to pull US troops out of the country in the first year or two of their terms, should they win.
The Democratic candidates were rearmed in their opposition to the war by a sharp outbreak of bloody fighting in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city and its major southern oil port, last month when Shiite militias fought each other. Iraqi government forces then mounted a surprise attack, moving into the city without consulting American commanders, according to McCain. The Iraqi government forces were unable to rout the militias and agreed to a shaky cease-fire.
With the presidential election just seven months off, President George W. Bush’s successor is certain to inherit the war that has cost more than 4,000 US military lives and nearly $500 billion over five years.
“Overall, it’s a remarkable success — overall with significant challenges ahead,” McCain told The Associated Press recently as he predicted what Petraeus will say about the troop-increase strategy and what he says he believes himself — even though the year of the buildup was the bloodiest yet for US troops. Clinton and Obama disagree.
“It is time to end this war as quickly and responsibly as possible,” Clinton, a New York senator, said last month and argued that the current strategy has not accomplished its goals because Iraqis have not reached a political reconciliation.
Obama, an Illinois senator, also wants a quick end to the war and said Friday: “We still don’t have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. (John) Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?” Obama said Bush and McCain have been “trumpeting improvements from a horrific situation to a simply unsustainable and intolerable situation.”
Public opinion on the war bodes poorly for McCain.
A CBS News poll last month found that a majority of Americans do not think the United States should have gone to war in Iraq. More than half of the public think the war is going badly and that the troop-increase strategy has not made the situation better. Two-thirds of the country expressed willingness to have large numbers of US troops in Iraq for two years or less, while nearly half say a significant level of forces would be acceptable only for another year.
Underscoring public uncertainty over who is best to lead on the issue, more than half of the country — 56 percent — said they were very or somewhat confident in McCain’s ability to make the right decisions about Iraq — but Clinton and Obama got essentially the same marks.
McCain was expected to use his seat on the Armed Services panel to praise Petraeus’ counterinsurgency operation. A day before the Senate testimony, McCain planned a similar message in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Missouri.
