McCain uses Petraeus hearing to gig Obama on al Qaeda in Iraq

Donald Lambro:

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"There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?" McCain asked the war commander.

"It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago," Petraeus replied.

"Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites," McCain said, then quickly correcting himself about the Sunni-dominated terrorist force, "or Sunnis or anybody else?"

"No," Petraeus answered.

"Al Qaeda continues to try to assert themselves in Mosul, is that correct? he asked.

"It is, senator," the four-star general responded, adding that, "Mosul and Nineveh province are areas that Al Qaeda is very much trying to hold on to."

Attempting to further nail down the point he was making, McCain asked again, "They continue to be a significant threat?"

"They do. Yes, sir," Petraeus responded.

Though he never mentioned the Democratic presidential frontrunner by name, McCain wanted to dismantle one of Obama's chief contentions regarding the war: that there is no serious Al Qaeda threat in Iraq in terms of a military infrastructure with command centers, bases, etc., and it is time to begin a full withdrawal of all combat forces there.

Obama has from the beginning maintained that Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the U.S invasion and only entered the country after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. His argument essentially maintains that the U.S. presence in Iraq is the sole cause of Al Qaeda presence in the country.

You would not be able to find any declaration in any of his campaign speeches that Al Qaeda, the radical Islamic terrorist force that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and many other people in attacks around the world, poses a dire threat to Iraq's fledgling democracy.

Indeed, if you visit Obama's campaign Web site and look up his position paper on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and scroll down to the very bottom of it, you will see a rather extraordinary statement. Obama asserts that if, after pulling most of our troops out of Iraq, Al Qaeda were to establish bases there, he would go back in with strategic forces to eliminate them.

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What McCain is doing is pointing out the incoherence of Obama's strategy. What Obama is gambling is that if we leave al Qaeda will leave, but if they do not we will go back in. As a matter of military strategy that position is nuts. It makes no sense. It completely ignores what the enemy is saying and what its leaders repeated just a few days ago when both bin Laden and Zawahiri said they still see Iraq as the central front in the war against us and view it as a base for launching strikes against Israel.

Obama's position has been one of the fantasies of the Democrat left on Iraq for several years, but it is just dead wrong and implementing that strategy will be costly in terms of blood, money and prestige. Al Qaeda would get a propaganda windfall on top of it. Our Iraqi allies would suffer terrible tragedy and our credibility with them would be nil under the Obama plan.