BAGHDAD, 17 March 2008 — US Republican presidential candidate John McCain arrived in Iraq yesterday to assess the success of a troop build-up, part of a trip to the Middle East and Europe on which he planned to emphasize national security.
He was due to meet Iraqi leaders and US officials in central Baghdad’s heavily fortified “Green Zone,” said US Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo, as part of a fact-finding mission for the US Senate Armed Services Committee.
McCain, who will be the Republican choice for November’s presidential election, and Senate allies Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham will also visit Israel, Britain and France.
Analysts see the trip as a chance for McCain to project himself as a world leader while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fight out a bitter Democratic nomination process at home.
While acknowledging that world leaders like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy might see the trip as a chance to size him up as a potential president, McCain has said he is not traveling as a candidate.
He said before leaving the United States he would be talking about national security and not politics. The visit is his eighth to Iraq since US-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.
McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam War hero, was a vocal critic of how the war was conducted until an extra 30,000 troops were deployed last year as part of a new counter-insurgency strategy.
Attacks across Iraq have fallen by 60 percent since last June, when the troop build-up was completed.
There has been a spike in violence since January but US commanders in Iraq say this does not represent a trend. The extra troops, the growth of neighborhood security units by mainly Sunni tribal leaders who turned against Al-Qaeda, and a cease-fire called by Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr for his Mehdi Army militia have all helped in the security gains.
Reconciliation Conference
Washington has been urging Baghdad to take advantage of improving security to press ahead with political measures aimed at reconciling majority Shiite and minority Sunni Muslims.
While some progress has been made on key laws, the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki remains deadlocked on others like a revenue-sharing oil law for Iraq’s reserves of crude, the world’s third largest.
Late on Saturday, Al-Maliki announced that a national reconciliation conference would be held this week. Government spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh said political parties and tribal and religious leaders would take part in the two-day gathering.
In the United States, the increasingly unpopular war is a major issue in the presidential campaign, with Hillary and Obama pledging to withdraw US troops at a rate of one or two brigades a month.
The war has slipped off front pages to be replaced by domestic US economic concerns, but McCain’s visit comes as the number of US troops killed since 2003 nears the 4,000 mark.
McCain has said that the quickest way to bring the war to a conclusion is by “continuing the surge.”
He said before leaving the US he feared anti-US groups like Sunni Islamist Al-Qaeda might attempt large-scale attacks in a bid to influence the November US presidential election.
On his last visit in April 2007, McCain made an embarrassing gaffe, saying after a tightly choreographed visit to a Baghdad market that the American people were not being told the “good news” about the war in Iraq.
Iraq was still gripped by widespread sectarian violence at the time and McCain later admitted he had misspoken in his upbeat assessment.
