McCain says hold GOP rivals accountable on Iraq

By Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff

Senator John McCain, a longtime supporter of the Iraq war while remaining a fierce critic of its execution, said he now had full confidence in President Bush's management of the conflict and that he should be judged by its success. At the same time, McCain said, some of his rivals should be held to account for the war's failings.

"This is the strategy that I advocated the first six months of the conflict," McCain said in an interview today in Nashua, New Hampshire, twelve hours after Bush announced in a prime-time address that he would accept the recommendations of General David Petraeus to draw down forces in Iraq to their pre-"surge" levels. "I would hope that would incline [voters] to me favorably when they judge my qualifications -- the fact that I was correct in my assessment of the failures and correct in my assessment of what was needed to succeed."

In echoing arguments made by Senator Barack Obama against his Democratic rivals by insisting that his early position against the war should ratify voters' confidence in his judgment, McCain tried to distinguish himself from Republicans, including presidential candidates, who uncritically stood by the administration's war policy in its early years. "I don't think they understood it, otherwise I don't think they would have supported it," McCain said. "When we judge people's qualifications, I hope that is one of the measurements they'll make a judgment on."

McCain's two-day New Hampshire visit was part of a "No Surrender" tour designed to rally opposition to Democratic efforts to reduce troop the presence and to bring the debate under way on Capitol Hill to three early primary states.

"Democrats want to return to the failed policies of the past, which were obviously Republican policies -- or administration policies -- which are proven to be failures," McCain said. "Now they want to return to it. I don't get it."

In remarks later in the day at a VFW hall in Londonderry, McCain, flanked by fellow veterans and personnel from a local Army recruiting station, didn't address any issues other than Iraq. Yet in the interview, he insisted that the "No Surrender" tour -- embracing a slogan used most recently by John Kerry, who entered the 2004 Democratic National Convention to the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name -- was a matter of duty and not opportunity.

"It was not my plan, it was not my idea. I would much rather be debating other issues and let General Petraeus do his job rather than dragging back to Washington for a couple days of interrogation," McCain said. "It's the Democrats that think this issue is helping them and if you look at public opinion polls there might be something to it."