Both Hagel and McCain, contenders in the 2008 race for the White House, realize that Iraq is going to be a make or break issue for the presidential elections next year and are staking out their positions. McCain was apparently trying to shore up the conservative base on his visit by highlighting security improvements in Baghdad–a tactic that backfired when he admitted that a huge security detail had escorted him throughout the city. His claims were blasted across the blogosphere and provided plenty of fodder for cable news pundits (In one segment on “The Daily Show”, presenter Jon Stewart juxtaposed a montage of McCain’s comments about increased safety in the capital mixed in with shots of the security detail that followed him around). McCain finally held a press conference in Phoenix last Monday to try and quiet things down. He admitted that the market he visited “isn’t entirely safe” but couldn’t resist a bit of swaggering. “I’m not notorious for being nervous about going anywhere,” he said.
Hagel avoided the John Wayne approach and kept his press briefing, more of a photo-op really, to less than 15 minutes. The senator clearly understood that highlighting security improvements in Baghdad would be a tough sell only three days after a suicide bomber attacked the Iraqi parliament in what is now called the International Zone (but still known to many here as the Green Zone), where today’s presser was also held. And the violence has only stepped up since that attack: six bombs exploded in Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad today, killing approximately 50 people and an attack in the holy city of Karbala killed more than 37 people yesterday.
Instead, Hagel–one of the most vocal Republican critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy–talked about the handover of responsibilities to the Iraqi government in a way that is likely to resonate with some voters back in the United States. “We can’t continually stay in Iraq the way we are currently and have been in Iraq,” he said. “It isn’t and never was intended to be an open ended commitment. At some point the Iraqi people have a responsibility, the prime minister said it today and the Iraqi leaders we met with are all aware of this, to move forward.”
This isn’t a message that’s going to be particularly well received by Iraqi leaders. Many of them would prefer not think about what’s coming next. But, after the backlash from McCain’s visit, it’s probably the message that’s going to be repeated by future Congressional delegations. Some Iraqi officials, a minority, welcome a U.S. drawdown. “The Iraqi government, since they’ve been depending on the Americans for the past four years, are not happy about any talk of withdrawal,” Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament said in a recent interview. “They want the babysitting to continue, which I think is wrong. The terrorists may benefit from it. I think the future of Iraq will benefit more.”
