Barack Obama vowed yesterday to visit war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan before the US presidential election as he comes under fire from his war-hero rival John McCain.

The Democratic candidate said that he would pay only his second trip to Iraq after speaking by telephone to the country’s Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who met Mr McCain in Washington on Sunday. “I told him that I look forward to seeing him in Baghdad,” Mr Obama told reporters.

Mr Obama reiterated his call for a US troop withdrawal, saying that the Iraq war is crippling the American economy and calling on the Iraqi Government to “pick up the tab” with its soaring oil revenues.

John McCain, the Republican candidate, who has visited Iraq eight times, has repeatedly attacked Mr Obama for calling for a precipitous troop withdrawal and criticised him for failing to visit the country since the US surge began. The Republican Party has posted a clock on its website counting the days — 890 as of yesterday — since Mr Obama visited Iraq.

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is a McCain advisor, said that she hoped Mr Obama would be forced to “acknowledge the surge is working” when confronted with the facts on the ground.

Mr Obama made his announcement on Iraq as he visited Michigan for the first time in a year to shore up support in a Democrat-leaning state viewed as vulnerable to Mr McCain.

Former Vice-President Al Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was due to make his first joint appearance with Mr Obama at a rally in Detroit last night. “From now through election day I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected president of the United States,” Mr Gore told supporters in an e-mail.

The Obama campaign is telling donors that the Illinois senator can still become America’s first black president even if he loses the two key battleground states of Florida and Ohio — which determined the 2000 and 2004 elections, respectively.

David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s campaign manager, is targeting Virginia in particular, where a Democratic presidential candidate has not won since 1964, as well as Georgia and several Rocky Mountain states.

Mr Obama continues to court Hillary Clinton’s female supporters, delivering a strong message in a Fathers’ Day address at a Chicago church on Sunday to black fathers to be more responsible. “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are Awol,” he said.

With his wife and daughters sat in the front pew, Mr Obama said growing up in a home without a father took a toll on him. But he acknowledged that he was an “imperfect father” himself because of all the time he spent away from his family on the campaign trail.

The first former top Hillary Clinton staffer switched to the Obama camp yesterday when Mr Obama named Patti Solis Doyle, who stepped down as his rival’s campaign manager in February, as chief-of-staff of his yet-to-be-chosen running mate. The latest polls show Mr Obama trailing Republican rival Mr McCain by an average of 8.3 per cent in Florida but leading in Ohio by 1.3 per cent.

Peter Brown, an expert on Florida and Ohio at the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said that it was possible for Mr Obama to win the presidency without taking Ohio, if he wins Iowa, New Mexico and either Nevada, Colorado or Virginia.

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