US Democrat Barack Obama has said insisted there is no military solution to the Iraq's problems and called for the redeployment of US forces.
Obama spoke a day after his main Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made similar comments. She said the tactics of the short-term troop increase were working but political progress did not seem to be in sight and the U.S. should begin bringing some troops home.
Obama said in a telephone briefing, "If we put 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad, it will quell some of the violence short term. I don't think there is any doubt about that."
But that won't solve Iraq's critical political problems, he said in the call and again later in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
"All of our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq," Obama said at the VFW convention in Kansas City.
"No military surge can succeed without political reconciliation and a surge of diplomacy in Iraq and the region. Iraq's leaders are not reconciling. They are not achieving political benchmarks. The only thing they seem to have agreed on is to take a vacation."
He concluded, "That is why I have pushed for a careful and responsible redeployment of troops engaged in combat operations out of Iraq, joined with direct and sustained diplomacy in the region."
A day earlier, Clinton, too, told the vets that new tactics have brought some success against insurgents, particularly in Iraq's Anbar province.
"It's working. We're just years too late in changing our tactics," she said. "We can't ever let that happen again."
As for the broader situation in Iraq, she said, "I do not think the Iraqis are ready to do what they have to do for themselves yet. ... I think it is unacceptable for our troops to be caught in the crossfire of a sectarian civil war while the Iraqi government is on vacation."
AP