McCain I: Scewing The Pooch On Iraq

After months of peddling a position on the Iraq war that has included an American troop presence anywhere from 100 years down to five years as he has had to repeatedly backpedal, John McCain now finds himself marginalized with Nouri Al-Maliki and Barack Obama, of all people, stealing his thunder on his war.

The presumptive Republican nominee already was on shaky ground by making the "success" of the Surge his major Iraq talking point and declaring the war "won" but offering only an ambiguous plan for ending American involvement.

The Surge has indeed been a success militarily, but the window of opportunity it provided for Prime Minister Al-Maliki and his fellow Shiites to work things out with the Sunnis has not produced major progress and now all-important provincial elections in the fall may be in peril. Besides which, that's all so yesterday in the 24/7 world of new.

Today's news is how isolated McCain seems to have become after Al-Maliki endorsed Obama's plan to withdraw U.S. troops in 16 months or so as pretty much resembling his own in an interview with a German magazine.

This tempest might have passed relatively quickly, but the only effort at a retraction was issued not by the Iraqis but by the military press office of the American occupiers, while a translation of what Al-Maliki said clearly showed who his horse is in the presidential race.

If that was not bad enough for McCain, Al-Maliki made no bones about where his sentiments lie as the man with the plan got the red-carpet treatment when he stopped by the PM's office in the Green Zone yesterday en route to what is shaping up to be a hugely enthusiastic reception in Europe.

McCain settled for a trip to the Poppy Zone, the Maine home of former President George H.W. Bush, where he glowered for the cameras and chewed on his ever handy supply of sour grapes.

But while McCain is screwing the pooch on Iraq, he is fortunate that few Americans will notice. Obama still has an uphill fight to convince voters that he has foreign policy and national security cred, and events on the ground in Iraq could unravel quickly, which would play to McCain. And although some commentators are calling Al-Maliki's endorsement the biggest development of the campaign, let's not forget that he is a scumbag of the first water. And is using Obama to his own advantage, of course. And vise versa.

In any event, a funny thing is happening on the way to November: Obama seems more like the realist when it comes to the war than does McCain, who must be struggling hard to suppress his imperialistic instincts.

The hateful John Derbyshire, who reliably unloads buckets of bile over those ungrateful Iraqis, might well have been reading McCain's mind when he penned this screed over at The Corner:

"Now that our American blood and money has seen off most of the enemies of Maliki and his Iranian pals, it is perfectly natural for them to believe they can finish the job themselves, without further assistance from us. Maliki can now afford to start putting distance between himself and the U.S.A. — essential for political viability in a region where the U.S.A. is pretty generally hated.

"We should tell Maliki, loudly and in public, that he owes his job to us, and that further prosecution of our military operations in his country will be conducted with regard only to U.S. interests, as determined in consensus by our established domestic political processes. And if he doesn't like that, he can go to hell."

Meanwhile, in a delicious sideshow to all of this, The New York Times has rejected a McCain response to Obama's recent op-ed piece on his troops withdrawal plan because it merely was a critique of Obama's views. Times opinion page editor David Shipley told the McCain campaign that he would be pleased to look at another draft.

A campaign spokesman, conveniently and convincingly missing the point, harrumphed that McCain wasn't going to change his position on Iraq because of The Times' "demands."

Ahem.

Pool photograph by Thaier al-Sudani