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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-25 09:34

Despite all that, McCain told reporters: "I don't think I would change the strategy now unless General Petraeus recommended it. I think he's trusted by the American people, the president and by me. And General Petraeus again showed me facts on the ground where the surge is succeeding."

Democrats took issue with his remarks and cast his candidacy as a repeat of President Bush's tenure.

"As Americans mark another somber milestone in the war in Iraq, John McCain continues his pattern of parroting the Bush administration's misleading rhetoric on the war," Democratic Party spokeswoman Karen Finney said in a statement.

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In the midst of a western fundraising swing after a week abroad, including visits to Iraq, the Middle East and Europe, the Arizona senator didn't mention the grim casualty milestone or the last weeks fifth anniversary of the conflict as he spoke to veterans and others at a stuffy Veterans of Foreign Wars building during a town-hall style campaign event outside of San Diego.

"I've commented on hundreds of occasions of the sacrifice the great and brave young Americans have made in Iraq and elsewhere in the world in the struggle against radical Islamic extremism," McCain told reporters afterward. He said a bracelet he always wears with the name of Matthew Stanley, who was killed in Iraq, is a symbol not just of his sacrifice but also of Stanley's 4,000 fallen comrades.

"My thoughts and my prayers go out to those families every day," McCain added.

Also left unsaid during the event was the fact that 2007 was the war's deadliest year with 901 American troop deaths. That was when Bush took McCain's advice and sent thousands more US troops to Iraq to quell violence in Baghdad. McCain long had called for such a strategy shift, and he effectively linked his presidential candidacy to the war last year even as public support for it plummeted.

"I'm not painting to you the most rosy scenario but I am telling you, compared to a year ago, before we started this surge, and with this great general, one of the great generals in American history, General David Petraeus, that we are succeeding in Iraq," McCain told his audience.

Asked later if he was offering the war-weary public any different path forward in Iraq than Bush, McCain reached back to the past.

"I'm offering them the record of having objected strenuously to a failed strategy for nearly four years. That I argued against and fought against and said that the secretary of defense of my own party, and my own president, I had no confidence in. That's how far I went in advocating the new strategy that is succeeding," McCain told reporters.

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