Bloomberg Reports McCain Predicts Terrorist Attacks & Political Cartoon of the Day

``Al-Qaeda is on their heels but not defeated,'' McCain said today at a town hall meeting with General Motors workers in Warren, Michigan. ``I also predict that they will make an attempt, as we get into election season, to make more of these spectacular kinds of attacks'' by suicide bombers to destabilize the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

McCain, an Arizona senator, has spent much of this week touting his foreign policy and war experience while Democratic rival Barack Obama prepared for a trip to the Middle East. McCain has criticized Obama, an Illinois senator, for vowing to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. McCain said the deployment of extra U.S. troops to Iraq last year has worked.

Earlier this year, McCain adviser Charlie Black caused a controversy when he was quoted in a Fortune magazine interview that the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before the New Hampshire primary ``helped us'' by highlighting that McCain ``is the guy who's ready to be commander in chief.'' Black added that a ``fresh terrorist attack certainly would be a big advantage'' politically.

Black later said he ``deeply'' regretted making the statement and McCain distanced himself from the comments.

``Senator Obama said the surge would fail. He still fails to admit that it has succeeded,'' McCain said in response to a question from the audience. ``I am confident we will win.''

Ok so the Political Cartoon of the day really doesn't have much to do with the election this year a whole lot, but todays article does deal with foreign policy and this political cartoon really does deal with foreign policy. This cartoon also was just a unique find for me since it is kind of old and quite witty. You could take this political cartoon and replace the swastica with a particular garment and suddenly it would become quite relevant but we wont discuss that too much. So lets just get on to the real foreign policy relevant to the modern world instead of an old political cartoon.

The Illinois senator has over the past two days escalated a campaign to minimize Iraq in the context of the overall war on terror.

Obama on Wednesday stressed the need to secure loose nuclear material and draw down nuclear stockpiles around the world. He said if the nation devoted just one month of Iraq combat costs, estimated to be $10 billion, it could virtually wipe out the threat of weapons-grade nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.

In what was billed as a major foreign policy address Tuesday, Obama said the Iraq war has become a distraction from fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and pledged to end the war by the summer of 2010.

Barack Obama’s continued call for a troop withdrawal timetable in Iraq has critics complaining that he’s set on that policy before even taking his highly anticipated trip to the Middle East.

“He’s going to Iraq but he’s already decided his position,” Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a top John McCain supporter, told FOX News on Wednesday. “He’s not going to listen to (David) Petraeus. He’s not going to listen to our troops. He’s not going to listen to his own eyes with what he sees there.”

The McCain campaign seized on an editorial Wednesday in The Washington Post that criticized Obama for sticking with his 16-month troop withdrawal timeline, even after hinting that he would “refine” his policy after visiting Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timeline is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq,” the editorial said. “American commanders will probably tell Mr. Obama that from a logistical standpoint, a 16-month withdrawal timetable will be difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. … If Mr. Obama really intends to listen to such advisers, why would he lock in his position in advance?”

McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann said on a conference call that Obama’s plan is an “ideologically driven commitment to withdrawing at any cost.”

“The American people have had enough of inflexibility on national security policy,” he said, obliquely criticizing the Bush administration.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement that Obama was also “committing to a policy” for Afghanistan before even visiting the country, and that “Barack Obama has shown he views foreign policy through a lens of ideology rather than through looking at facts.”

The Obama campaign argues that McCain is just now “waking up” to problems in Afghanistan, and claims he has no workable plan for either conflict.

Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said on a conference call that McCain “wants to stay indefinitely at high-troop levels in Iraq, regardless of the situation, whether it’s improving or deteriorating.”

Obama released a new ad Wednesday addressing his national security platform.

“Forty years ago it was missile silos and the Cold War. Today, it’s cyber attacks, loose nukes, oil money funding terrorism,” the narrator in the ad says. “Barack Obama understands our changing world.”

As for the Washington Post editorial, she said it represented a narrow-minded approach to a broad set of national security threats.

“The Post would have you believe that we have the luxury of worrying only about one challenge and, whether it’s going well or going poorly, the answer is the same: to stay indefinitely,” she said.

“But we have a fundamental difference on the threat environment that we face globally.”