McCain targets Obama over his reluctance to visit Iraq

REPUBLICAN senator John McCain has accused his expected presidential rival, Barack Obama, of refusing to visit Iraq after he turned down the offer of a joint trip by the two candidates.

In an attempt to portray Mr Obama as lacking the experience for high office, Mr McCain says his Democrat rival has shied away from visits despite being a member of the Senate armed services committee.

"Senator Obama has been to Iraq once – a little over two years ago he went and he has never seized the opportunity except in a hearing to meet with General Petraeus (the US commander]," Mr McCain said, campaigning in Nevada. "My friends, this is about leadership and learning."

To ram the point home, the Republican Party website now features an online clock showing the number of days, currently 873 (including today) since Mr Obama's last visit.

The Illinois senator insists he is planning a visit of his own, but it would be a "political stunt" to arrive together with Mr McCain.

"If I'm going to Iraq, then I'm there to talk to troops and talk to commanders, I'm not there to try to score political points," he said.

Mr McCain, a Vietnam war veteran, polls better than Mr Obama on the subject of national security, but fighting him on the issue of Iraq is a risky decision.

The so-called "troop surge" of the past year has cut the violence, but failed to combat public opinion: 67 per cent of voters say the war is being badly run, down only fractionally from the 70 per cent last year.

Mr McCain insists the Iraq policy is working, and wants to give it more time, although he has dropped his call for US troops to stay "100 years", saying he hopes to have them out by the end of his first term in office.

He insists the "surge" will keep militants on the back foot, giving time for democratic processes to take root.

But Americans are ever more sceptical that this can be achieved. They are concerned that violence in many Sunni areas has ended only after the Pentagon began making payments to local warlords. This not only raises moral questions, but also empowers the warlords, undercutting the democracy that the White House insists it is working to install.

Nor is there much love for the Iraqi government. Its recent offensives against militants in Basra and in the Sadr City district of Baghdad produced a stalemate. The fighting stopped only when the militants decided that it should stop, leaving many wondering who actually runs the country.

Meanwhile, the Senate armed services committee is investigating why Iraq is not paying more for its own reconstruction.

Reports show that Iraq has amassed £28 billion in the bank as a result of high oil prices, yet last year spent only 4 per cent of the money promised for reconstruction.

Last month, Mr Obama demanded that money the US is spending on Iraqi infrastructure should be switched to repairing America's crumbling bridges and highways.

Dismay about the Iraq war was sharpened this week by accusations in the memoirs of Scott McClellan, a former White House spokesman, that the Bush administration misled the public over the reasons for going to war.

Meanwhile, the US army has revealed an increase in military suicides to 108 last year, the highest total for at least a decade.

Mr McCain's election strategy is to try and get past arguments about the rights and wrongs of the war, and concentrate on the awkward reality – which is that if the US troops pull out of Iraq, al-Qaeda may move in, setting up bases to launch attacks on the United States.

This reality has produced some convergence between the policies of Mr Obama and Mr McCain.

While Mr McCain says the troops will be out in four years, Mr Obama says they will be out in less than two, but adds that a force must remain behind indefinitely to tackle al-Qaeda.

International leaders pressed to cancel $60bn debt

IRAQ pressed its creditors to cancel about $60 billion in debts at an international conference in Sweden yesterday, but two of its biggest creditors, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, sent only junior representatives to hear the call.

The Iraqi delegation, led by the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, basked in praise from international leaders lauding the country's economic and political development five years after the United States invaded to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Stockholm conference was the first annual review of the International Compact with Iraq agreed in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last year, which committed Iraq to implement reforms in exchange for greater support.

Mr Maliki said the large debts, some dating back almost 30 years, and compensation payments for Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, were shackling the economy.

Iraq is obliged to set aside 5 per cent of its oil revenues as compensation payments, amounting to $3.5 billion this year.

"Iraq is not a poor country. It possesses tremendous human and material resources, but the debts of Iraq … which we inherited from the dictator, hamper the reconstruction process," Mr Maliki told the conference.

"We are looking forward to the brother countries writing off its (Iraq's] debts, which are a burden on the Iraqi government," he said.