Obama aides attack Clinton on foreign policy

By Caren Bohan

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton's foreign policy would be more of the same failed Republican approach, Barack Obama's campaign said on Thursday, as aides stepped up their attacks after losses in this week's Democratic presidential nominating race.

Clinton, who revived her struggling campaign with victories on Tuesday in closely watched contests in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island, has been hammering away at Obama on national security, painting him as too inexperienced to handle a world crisis.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, has used a similar line of criticism against Obama.

Obama aides seized on the simultaneous attacks to accuse the New York senator of choosing to "align herself with Sen. McCain."

"I guess Sen. Clinton believes that the way to beat Sen. McCain in a debate is to talk like he talks, act like he acts, and vote like he votes on national security issue," Obama adviser Greg Craig told reporters on a conference call. "We believe that Democrats in the past have lost national security debates to the Republicans for these reasons."

The defeats for Obama in the hard-fought large states of Ohio and Texas on Tuesday snapped an earlier winning streak. In their aftermath, the Illinois senator expressed frustration with what he said was a "very negative" campaign Clinton had run and he vowed to hit back harder against her criticisms.

Many political analysts think a television commercial that Clinton launched focusing on national security had succeeded in raising doubts about Obama.

The ad featured sleeping children and a phone ringing at the White House as a narrator ominously warns: "It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there is a phone in the White House and its ringing. Something is happening in the world."

The narrator then asks whether the person answering the White House phone is "tested" enough to keep America safe.

On the conference call, Craig said Clinton had "aligned herself" with McCain on some specific issues, such as putting too much trust in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and supporting a legislative amendment aimed at stepping up pressure on Iran.

But the Clinton campaign shot back that such comments distorted the New York senator's record.

"Distorting Hillary's record won't address the doubts voters have about Senator Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief," said Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer.

Clinton held a meeting in Washington on Thursday with top military leaders and experts, and said their support showed confidence in her ability to make important national security decisions, including those in which "lives are on the line."

The Obama campaign has derided Clinton's characterization of herself as steeped in foreign policy experience based on her years as first lady and her travels and work as a senator.

Obama adviser Susan Rice said the ability to handle that 3 a.m. crisis phone call is not something that can be acquired "merely by being married to a commander-in-chief."

(Reporting by Caren Bohan, editing by Philip Barbara)

Choosing Which War to Fight

The Candidates
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON

TWO weeks ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise trip to Afghanistan that was so cloaked in extra security and secrecy that reporters traveling with her weren’t told where they were going until her plane had taken off from London.

Arriving in Kabul, Ms. Rice’s entourage was immediately hustled across the runway to a gray C-17 military transport plane for a one-hour trip to Kandahar, where she stayed for less than three hours, never venturing off the airfield where NATO forces have their headquarters. Then it was back to Kabul for lunch with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in his barricaded palace. A mere eight hours after landing in Afghanistan, Ms. Rice was gone. She had spent, all told, only six hours on the ground; her plane, with its distinct blue and white United States of America logo, made a swift, steep ascent, disappearing from rocket range within minutes.

The secrecy and security that surrounded Ms. Rice’s visit highlight a central question that has now thrust its way into this year’s presidential campaign: Six years after the United States invaded Afghanistan with the goal of rooting out Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the terrorist threat, Afghanistan remains a security danger zone for Americans, far more so than in 2002, the year in between the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?

The three leading contenders for the presidential nominations have staked out positions that differ radically, along party lines. All three say they believe that Afghanistan is an important security threat that needs to be addressed. But the Republican, John McCain, suggests that Iraq remains America’s bugaboo of security threats, while the two Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, appear to have moved on to Afghanistan. Both of them argue that focusing on Iraq gets in the way of a more serious threat in Afghanistan.

Senator McCain, the likely Republican nominee, makes a de facto argument that Iraq and Afghanistan are two sides of the same coin. “Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue,” Mr. McCain said in a Feb. 7 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Distilled to its simplest form, Mr. McCain’s argument is that withdrawing from Iraq would make Americans less safe in the long run, because a withdrawal would embolden Al Qaeda, put American interests at risk in the Middle East, and make an already volatile region less safe.

Senators Obama and Clinton have tacked in the opposite direction. Iraq, they argue, makes Afghanistan more dangerous. The Iraq war, Mr. Obama told an audience of supporters in Houston last Tuesday, “distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They’re the ones who killed 3,000 Americans.” He has said that if elected, he would deploy at least two additional brigades in Afghanistan.

Senator Clinton, who has been to Afghanistan three times, holds a similar position, her aides say, except they say that she hasn’t specified how many additional brigades she would send to Afghanistan because she wants to further explore the security situation there first. Mrs. Clinton has proposed appointing a special envoy to deal with the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

“There is a theater of war, that I would call AfPak, with two fronts — an eastern front and a western front,” said Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s. “I believe that we will look back ten years from now and say that AfPak was even more important to our national security than Iraq.”

For the Democrats, who have a base of support that clearly wants out of Iraq, framing the issue in terms of Afghanistan makes it a lot easier, politically, to pull out of Iraq. But leaving Iraq will be no easy thing. Experts who side with Mr. McCain argue that a quick American exit from Iraq could lead to a conflagration in the Middle East that could end up involving Saudi Arabia and Iran in a Shia-Sunni-Kurd war — a conflict that would have few winners and would likely produce an enormous number of civilian casualties.

Beyond that, the logistics of pulling out 130,000 troops from Iraq would be daunting, and it could take close to a year to get all the equipment out. Indeed, some military experts say that if the United States military was given a year to exit Iraq, it would be so consumed with the logistics that it wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates entered the fray earlier this month, for a moment sounding almost like the (gasp!) Clinton and Obama camps by urging Europeans to draw a distinction between the wars. During remarks on his way to Munich to take the Europeans to task for not sending enough troops to support NATO in Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said part of the problem was that many Europeans were conflating Iraq with Afghanistan.

“I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused,” Mr. Gates said. “I think they combine the two.” It was an unusually candid acknowledgment from a senior member of the Bush administration that the war in Iraq had exacted a cost, in NATO’s chances for victory in Afghanistan. Many Europeans, Mr. Gates said, “have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan, and do not understand the very different — for them — the very different kind of threat.”

The problem is, with the United States Army stretched thin in Iraq, the Bush administration has, thus far, been left to hector its NATO allies to send additional troops to handle the growing Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. And European populations generally disapprove of their troops being sent into harm’s way in Afghanistan. No surprise, given the opposition on the streets of Europe to the American invasion of Iraq. That’s what Mr. Gates means when he says that Europeans conflate the two: Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its G.I.’s weren’t bogged down in Iraq?

In any case, the dynamics of the two conflicts are not the same, many foreign policy experts stress. The rapidly deteriorating situation on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, the Musharraf government’s increased inability to confront Islamist insurgents in its border provinces, combined with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan have turned AfPak into America’s No. 1 national security problem, these experts say, even as parts of Iraq seem to have quieted since more American troops were sent there last year. Conditions in Pakistan became even more volatile on Monday after the party of President Pervez Musharraf suffered a drubbing in parliamentary elections, leading some to question how long Mr. Musharraf will be able to cling to power and how much of his already diminished authority he can retain. And Pakistan, the experts say, is inextricably linked to Afghanistan.

“Losing Afghanistan would be far more consequential than losing Iraq,” says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who was an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2004. “If Pakistan, especially along the border, fell into complete disarray, the integrity of the Afghan country and its government will be even more threatened, and that would have far greater repercussions for us.”

Slowly, Clinton Shifts on War, Quieting Foes

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and PATRICK HEALY

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — A little more than a year ago, before Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the race for the White House, she drew a storm of boos from an audience of liberal Democrats here as she declared that it would be a mistake to set a “date certain” for withdrawing American troops from Iraq.

But before another Democratic audience last month in Des Moines, Mrs. Clinton drew applause when she declared that it was time to begin “ending this war — not next year, not next month, but today.”

The senator, who voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq, has over the past year gradually repositioned herself on the war, the issue that her advisers have long viewed as the biggest obstacle to her winning the presidential nomination.

In a series of speeches, interviews and Senate votes, Mrs. Clinton has brought her stance much more in line with Democratic primary voters and the positions of most of her Democratic rivals — and has done it, so far, without sustained accusations of flip-flopping.

Her advisers said any evolution was the result of policy judgment reflecting the changing circumstances of the war, rather than a politically calculated repackaging. In many ways, her shift reflects changes in the nation’s view of whether a positive outcome is possible in Iraq.

The degree to which Mrs. Clinton has actually defused the issue will get a test on Saturday when she appears with fellow Democrats in a debate in Chicago before an audience of liberal bloggers, one of the most intensely antiwar constituencies in the party and one that has been particularly skeptical of — and often hostile toward — Mrs. Clinton.

But there is already evidence that she has made progress in reducing the intensity of the opposition to her among some of her most fervent antiwar opponents and in building support among the broader universe of Democrats who oppose the war.

A New York Times/CBS News poll in July 2006 found that among Democrats who said the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, 56 percent said they had a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton’s performance. A year later, that figure had risen to 69 percent. Her standing during that period among all Democrats has also shown improvement. On the campaign trail, antiwar protests at her appearances are less frequent and less loud.

“Thanks to her votes on defunding the war and supporting a timetable for withdrawal, she has defused the war issue as a problem for her, and her 2002 vote for the war, to quite an extent,” said Medea Benjamin, a leader of the antiwar group Code Pink, whose members once regularly booed and heckled Mrs. Clinton whenever she spoke about the war.

“There’s still a passionate minority of us who believe the fact she won’t apologize for her war vote is a big deal,” Ms. Benjamin said.

But, she added, “she has gone a long way to changing things.”

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal Daily Kos Web site, said Mrs. Clinton had “done a great job of blurring on the war.”

Mr. Moulitsas, whose Web site inspired this weekend’s gathering of bloggers in Chicago, cited Mrs. Clinton’s statements that she would leave a sizable military force in Iraq even after reducing the American military role there, saying that distinction was lost in the way she had presented her antiwar credentials.

“I don’t know if policy and rhetoric are aligned,” Mr. Moulitsas said. “But people don’t see the policy paper on our side; they hear what she says, and she talks a great game.”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton’s rivals argued she would still have a problem in the early voting states — Iowa and New Hampshire — where antiwar sentiments are high and Democrats are aware of her evolution on the issue.

“The people for whom the war is a No. 1 issue, she is always going to have a problem,” said Jonathan Prince, a deputy campaign manager for John Edwards. “The folks who are deciding their vote based on the war and are antiwar are quite aware that she has tacked back and forth on this.”

As a senator from North Carolina in 2002, Mr. Edwards also voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, but he later apologized for his vote — something Mrs. Clinton has not done — and has become an outspoken critic of the war.

Nonetheless, advisers to Mrs. Clinton’s opponents said she had made herself a much more elusive target. They said it had become more difficult to attack her for her history of supporting the war — and for refusing to apologize for her vote — than it had been when she had resisted setting a deadline for getting troops out.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton is not getting booed on the issue the way she was six months ago suggests, as some war critics and the senator’s advisers said on Friday, that it is not easy for an opponent of the war to jeer Mrs. Clinton as she is saying, “We need to bring our combat troops home from Iraq, starting right now,” as she did to a labor audience in Washington in June.

Mrs. Clinton has benefited because antiwar groups in Washington that have been pushing for Congress to cut off financing for the war have become more pragmatic, turning their heat on moderate Republicans who supported President Bush, and away from Democrats like Mrs. Clinton who once supported the war but have now changed.

Beyond that, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers suggested that she executed the shift with minimal political cost because there was no one moment in which she dramatically telegraphed a turn-around. From that perspective, they argued, her decision to resist calls from war opponents to apologize for her vote authorizing the war proved to be the right one, since it could have offered a critics an opportunity to label her as inconsistent — a line of attack that hurt Senator John Kerry in his 2004 presidential campaign and one that could have complicated Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to convince the nation that it can trust her to be commander in chief.

An adviser to one of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents, who did not want to be quoted by name offering praise for the way she was handling the issue, described the senator’s change as “more of a slide than a flip-flop.”

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers pointed to statements she has made and stances she has taken over the past year that have repositioned her. Those include her decision, this spring, to vote in favor of a troop withdrawal timetable, and her decision to support a cut off of money for the war. She signaled the shift with a speech to the Democratic National Committee in February saying, “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January of 2009, as president I will.”

Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of State, who is advising Mrs. Clinton on Iraq and other foreign policy issues, said, “Through the spring she became increasingly frustrated with the fact that the administration didn’t seem to listen.”

“You begin to kind of say, ‘O.K., now what? We need an answer,’ ” Ms. Albright said. “She was feeling a necessity to send a stronger and stronger message.”