REPUBLICAN presidential candidate John McCain launched a blistering attack on Barack Obama yesterday, accusing his rival for the White House of ignorance in foreign affairs.
The Arizona senator said Obama, who has returned from his world tour, "doesn't understand what's at stake" in Iraq by opposing the surge in troop numbers that has cut violence in recent months.
And Mr McCain stood by comments he made earlier in
the week that Mr Obama would "lose a war in order to win a political campaign."
"He (Mr Obama] chose to take a political path that would have helped him get the nomination of his party," Mr McCain told ABC. "And if we'd done what Senator Obama wanted done, it would have been chaos, genocide, increased Iranian influence, perhaps al-Qaeda establishing a base again."
Mr McCain's outburst came as polls showed that Mr Obama had opened a seven-point lead over his rival after a week-long trip that took him to Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe.
It was also an attempt to shift the focus of debate on Iraq, to arguments about whether the war was a good idea – Mr Obama opposed it, Mr McCain supported it – and a discussion about what happens now.
Mr McCain insists the "surge" has not just reduced violence, but has also created the conditions for Iraq to establish itself as a stable democracy – and said Iraq was now "a stable ally in the region". Opinion polls show that while voters warm to Mr Obama on domestic issues, they see Mr McCain as a more reliable commander-in-chief.
Mr McCain is seeking to bolster that view by advocating a much more hard-line stance on China and Russia.
He has already outlined his plan for a "League of Democracies" operating in the way the original United Nations was conceived, but only open to democracies including those in Europe, Brazil, India and Japan.
His plan and versions of it have strong cross-party support in the United States, which has come to see itself as besieged by enemies ranging from China and Russia to Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.
Mr McCain yesterday delivered his strongest criticism so far of Russia, branding the new president, Dmitri Medvedev, as a puppet of former president Valdimir Putin and saying Moscow had become an "autocracy" that must be expelled from the Group of Eight industrialised nations.
"We want better Russian behaviour internationally, and we have every right to expect it," he said, in defending a proposal that is opposed by the other G8 members, which only included Russia after the collapse of the Communist government there in the early 1990s.
Mr McCain also acknowledged that Mr Obama's plan to pull troops out of Iraq within 16 months, endorsed last week by Iraq's government, was "a pretty good timetable", an apparent change from his previous insistence that troops could stay "up to 100 years".
"Anything is a good timetable that is dictated by conditions on the ground," Mr McCain said.
"But the timetable is dictated, not by an artificial date, but by the conditions on the ground, the conditions of security."
