U.S. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama seized on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war to snipe at each other and at the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, who has tied his campaign to success in the unpopular conflict.
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McCain, meanwhile, was in London on Thursday, a day after visiting Israel and burnishing his credentials with the U.S. Jewish vote, insisting Israeli leaders were justified in their tough policy against Hamas militants in Gaza.
When the election campaign began, the Iraq war looked to be the key issue among U.S. voters who were increasingly disenchanted with the conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,000 Americans, while costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars (euros).
But as the U.S. economy slips toward recession and world equity markets gyrate dangerously, the war has become the second place issue among voters concerned about mortgage foreclosures, rising fuel costs and deep losses in their retirement investment accounts.
The war anniversary brought the issue back to the forefront Wednesday. U.S. President George W. Bush said America was safer and the world was a better place for his 2003 order to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein.
In a speech near North Carolina's Fort Bragg military base, Obama said Clinton could not be trusted to end the conflict. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama opposed the American invasion and has repeatedly reminded voters that Clinton voted in the upper house of the U.S. Congress to support Bush's request for authorization to invade.
"Ask yourself," Obama told the crowd, "who do you trust to end a war: Someone who opposed the war from the beginning, or someone who started opposing it when they started preparing a run for president?"
The Clinton campaign quickly fired back that the opposite was true.
"The reality is that Senator Obama took practically no action to end the war until he started his White House run, while Senator Clinton has been a consistent critic of Iraq for many years," campaign spokesman Phil Singer said.
Clinton countered on another issue during an appearance in Detroit _ the Michigan city that is capital of America's struggling auto industry. She said it would be "wrong, and frankly un-American" if Obama did not agree to new primaries in Michigan and Florida.
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