US:THE US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan, according to Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia.
Fresh from ruling himself out as a possible running mate for Barack Obama, Mr Webb's comments come as an implied criticism of the Democratic party's orthodoxy on Iraq and Afghanistan - including Mr Obama's own stance.
Following his recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr Obama welcomed growing support for his plan to set a timeline for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq and said the US "should seize the moment" to build up its presence in Afghanistan.
"The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan," he said.
Mr Webb politely disagreed with this, without mentioning Mr Obama or other Democratic colleagues by name. "We should be very careful from making it sound like we are withdrawing from Iraq because we have to build up in Afghanistan," said Mr Webb. "You're starting to see people say this when they weren't saying it before.
"We tend to be country-specific when we talk about how to defeat international terrorism rather than looking at the whole dynamic. The dynamic is that terrorism works the seams of international law. We can't create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can't be our objective."
A former secretary of the navy in the Reagan administration and a decorated Vietnam veteran, Mr Webb's views on defence are taken seriously by colleagues. His son, a US marine, has just returned from Iraq. Although he supports withdrawal from Iraq, he has not offered a timeline.
He believes withdrawal should only take place after a new administration has launched a "diplomatic surge" in the region, as suggested almost two years ago by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their report on Iraq.
He said that the US could be about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. "You have to have an articulable end-point," he said. "We've got to clearly understand what it is that the US wants to do in Afghanistan and understand what we can do."
But it is Mr Webb's background as a "Reagan Democrat" - the group of working-class Democratic supporters who switched to the Republicans in the aftermath of the Vietnam war - that gives him the most clout with his Democratic colleagues.
The 62-year-old senator believes that the conservative revolution that was fuelled by the switch of voters from his own Scots-Irish background to the Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s is drawing to a close. He said that the Democrats now had a "historic opportunity" to win back those voters and change the contours of American politics.
"One thing that I said when I decided to run for the Senate in 2006 was that if you take this bellwether [ Scots-Irish working-class] group, this is a test to see whether it can come back to its natural populist roots in the Democratic party and if you do that you will have a redefinition of the two parties," he said.
As he stated in his book Born Fighting, which argues that the Scots-Irish Protestants are the most important and overlooked ethnic group in the US, Mr Webb rejects the view that they are racially motivated.
"The story of the American south was never white against black. It was always a small minority of whites setting whites against blacks, and if those two cultures can get together at the same place on the table they can remake American politics."
Given that Mr Obama is African-American, Mr Webb's thesis is about to receive the ultimate test. Mr Webb says that the Democrats alienated working-class voters by following the dictates of "special interest groups". In contrast, the Republicans tailored specific social conservative appeals to win their support. "Karl Rove [ George W Bush's electoral maestro] knows this culture inside out and the Democrats don't even know it exists," he said.