McCain, Obama sharply divided on Iraq goals

Difficult trade-offs
Providing the American commander in Iraq with maximum leeway, however, could entail some difficult trade-offs. The senior American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, recently said he needed three more brigades in addition to the one Mr. Bush had agreed to send. That is more than either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain has promised to deploy in Afghanistan, and the American military is stretched so thin, the Pentagon says, there will be no additional brigades for Afghanistan until the force in Iraq is reduced further.

Political developments in Iraq may also constrain the American military’s flexibility. In January, Mr. McCain told a questioner at a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire that it would not matter if American troops were in Iraq for 50 or even 100 years if the country was stable and the American military was not suffering casualties, drawing an analogy with American deployments in postwar Japan or South Korea, two societies that seem far removed from the tumultuous Middle East.

After Democrats charged that Mr. McCain was advocating an open-ended troop commitment, he said in a speech in May that the success of his strategy would enable most American forces to return home from Iraq by January 2013.

The “time goal” in the draft Iraqi and American accord, however, would have American forces leave about a year earlier, though it is hard to predict how Iraqi leaders might feel about the need for an American presence several years from now, and American officials expect that at a minimum the training of Iraqi forces would continue after 2011 under the terms of the agreement.

Asked to clarify his views, Mr. McCain said in the interview that he envisioned “the withdrawal of U.S. troops over time.”

He said the question of whether there should be a long-term American military presence in Iraq for training or other purposes should be resolved in discussions with the Iraqis, and cited Kuwait as a possible model. “We have a military base there and a military presence,” Mr. McCain said. “And so I think the decision on the presence of U.S. troops will be made on a sovereign nation to sovereign nation basis.”

Prodding the Iraqis
A related and vital question is how the candidates hope to encourage the Iraqis to make headway on political reconciliation. For much of the Bush administration, Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq, emphasized transferring security tasks to Iraqi forces and slimming the American military presence as a way to get the Iraqis to take on added responsibilities. The result was sectarian violence, not political progress.

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Asked if he could identify an instance in which a reduction or pullback of American troops had spurred the Iraqis to reconcile their differences, Mr. Obama argued that elevated troop levels had also not led to adequate political progress.

“It is not clear that an ongoing, open-ended presence has prompted political change in Iraq either,” he said. “The fact is that we still don’t have an oil law. We still don’t have provincial elections. We have not dealt with Kirkuk, and the argument for staying is that we have not made sufficient political progress.”

Shortly after Mr. Obama made this comment, Iraq’s Parliament approved provincial elections. However, the government has yet to address the dispute over Kirkuk, an oil-rich city claimed by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmens.

In addition to using troop withdrawals to try to encourage change, Mr. Obama said he would end efforts to train the Iraqi military if Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government did not take adequate steps to integrate the largely Sunni members of the Awakening movements into Iraq’s security forces.

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