WASHINGTON — John McCain, chiding his Democratic presidential rivals for promising to withdraw troops from Iraq, said Monday that it would be "reckless" to leave the combat zone too quickly.
"I do not believe that anyone should make promises as a candidate for president that they cannot keep if elected," said McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee for president. "To promise a withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, regardless of the calamitous consequences to the Iraqi people, our most vital interests and the future of the Middle East, is the height of irresponsibility" and "a failure of leadership."
In a preview of the political fireworks surrounding the Capitol Hill testimony beginning today by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, McCain challenged Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton to confront the consequences of withdrawal.
"Doing the right thing in the heat of a political campaign is not always the easiest thing," he said. "But when 4,000 Americans have given their lives so that America does not suffer the worst consequences of our failure in Iraq . . . we must put the nation's interests before our own ambitions."
Hailing last year's buildup of U.S. troops as "a critical moment in our nation's history," McCain told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Mo., that Congress should reject, as it did last year, calls for what he labeled "a reckless and irresponsible withdrawal of our forces just at the moment when they are succeeding."
The Clinton and Obama campaigns countered that the 5-year-old war had failed to make the U.S. safer.
"It's a failure of leadership to support an open-ended occupation of Iraq that has failed to press Iraq's leaders to reconcile, badly overstretched our military, put a strain on our military families, set back our ability to lead the world and made the American people less safe," said Illinois Sen. Obama.
Clinton issued a statement chastising McCain's Iraq strategy as "four more years of the Bush-Cheney-McCain policy of continuing to police a civil war while the threats to our national security, our economy and our standing in the world mount."
"We simply cannot give the Iraqi government an endless blank check," the New York senator said. "It is time to end this war as quickly, as responsibly and as safely as possible."
