Obama, Edwards Criticize Clinton on Iran

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Chicago, March 2, 2007, about Iraq and the strengthening strategic position of Iran. Hillary Rodham Clinton's vote in Sept. 2007 to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization is reverberating on the campaign trail, especially with Obama, who's again questioning her antiwar credentials and judgement. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File) (Charles Rex Arbogast - Associated Press)

Obama, speaking Friday at Drake University in Des Moines, gave a harsh assessment of Clinton's foreign policy views.

He criticized the New York senator for her recent vote designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, saying she was repeating a mistake she made in voting to authorize the Iraq war.

"Senator Clinton is the only Democratic candidate for president who supports this amendment," Obama said, calling it a "blank check" for President Bush to attack Iran.

"I don't want to give this president any excuse, any opening for war," said Obama who missed that vote because he was campaigning in New Hampshire.

The Clinton campaign responded with a statement distributed by spokesman Mark Daley: "Once again Senator Obama has abandoned the politics of hope to engage in the same old attack politics. If Senator Obama really believed that this measure gave the president a blank check for war he should have been there, speaking out and fighting against it."

The dismissive reference to Obama's slogan about the "politics of hope" was followed by a memo distributed by the Obama camp quoting one of Clinton's own sayings.

Said the memo from spokesman Bill Burton: "It is clear that just as voters are becoming more engaged in the campaign in the early primary states that Senator Clinton and her campaign have abandoned the politics of 'let's have a conversation' in favor of purely tactical posturing."

Obama, noting that the vote to authorize the Iraq war came five years ago this week, said in Iowa that Democrats in Congress _ including Clinton and Edwards, who was then a North Carolina senator _ bear some responsibility for what's happened since.

"Senator Edwards voted for the war in 2002," Obama said. "He has renounced that vote instead of pretending that it was a vote for anything but war."

He said Clinton's arguments that she was voting for more inspections or diplomacy are misleading. "All of us know what was being debated in the Congress in the fall of 2002," he said, again stressing his early opposition to the war while he was a state senator in Illinois.

Obama said Democrats must stop believing they "can't win elections unless they talk, act and vote like Republicans when it comes to foreign policy and national security."

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Associated Press Writers Jim Davenport and Shannon McCaffrey contributed to this article from South Carolina and Georgia.