Baghdad, Iraq – Sen. John McCain took his controversial proposal for curbing Iraq’s sectarian violence to Baghdad on Thursday, calling for an additional 15,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops and joining a congressional delegation in telling Iraq’s prime minister he must break his close ties with a radical Shiite cleric.
McCain’s position puts him at odds with American public opinion and with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended withdrawing a substantial number of U.S. troops over the coming year.
But the Arizona Republican said Americans must realize that if U.S. troops leave Iraq in chaos, groups such as al-Qaeda “will follow us home and that we will have a large conflict and greater challenges than those that we now face.”
Another senator in the delegation, Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said the delegation met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, and urged him to break ties with Muqtada al-Sadr and disarm the anti-U.S. cleric’s Mahdi Army militia, which has been blamed, along with Sunni Arab insurgents, for the sectarian violence and ruthless attacks on U.S. forces.
