March 19, 2008
McCain Mixes Up Iraqi Groups
by Cameron W. Barr and Michael D. Shear
The Washington Post
AMMAN, Jordan, March 18 -- Sen. John McCain, in the midst of a trip to the Middle East that he hoped would help burnish his foreign policy expertise, incorrectly asserted Tuesday that Iran is training and supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq, confusing the Sunni insurgent group with the Shiite extremists who U.S. officials believe are supported by their religious brethren in the neighboring country.
The mistake, which he quickly corrected after a brief whisper from a colleague, was an unwelcome stumble as McCain (Ariz.), the all-but-certain Republican nominee for the White House, spends seven days in the Middle East and Europe.
His campaign asserts that McCain's decades of foreign policy experience make him the candidate best equipped to lead the country in a time of international peril, and he has staked his bid in particular on his deep knowledge of the military and political situation in Iraq, frequently mocking his Democratic rivals for what he describes as a naive desire to pull troops out quickly. He is spending two days in Israel after 48 hours in Iraq, where he met with top Iraqi officials and U.S. military officers to assess progress there.
Standing with two of his Senate colleagues at the Citadel, a set of ancient ruins in downtown Amman, McCain told reporters that he is concerned about Iran's influence in Iraq and cited a recently discovered cache of weapons that he said could be particularly lethal in being used to target Americans in the country.
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