On Iraq Troop Withdrawals, The Emperor & His Wannabe Heir Have No Clothes

What's a warmonger to do?

The Iraqi government is feeling its oats because of a semblance of stability on the military front, there is a chance that provincial elections in the fall might bring some calm to the fractious political front, and a security agreement that gives Washington the ranch and Baghdad sloppy seconds will be DOA unless it is rewritten to respect Iraqi national sovereignty and includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable.

Worse still, President Bush and John McCain find themselves in an exceedingly uncomfortable position because Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and his security surrogates and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama seem to be on the same page regarding that timetable.

But then the Iraq war has never really been a war of liberation for Bush and the man who would represent a third Bush term. Any doubt about that was removed yesterday when the White House rejected out of hand any timetable.

The war, of course, has been about advancing America's agenda in the Middle East. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was just a pretext for foisting the neocon wet dream of democracy on a bunch of people who worship a false God and wear funny clothes.

The welfare of Iraq has been well down a priority list that includes a slew of military bases from which Iran can more conveniently be subverted, target practice for thugs from Blackwater and other U.S. security firms ostensibly guarding diplomats, awarding tens of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected U.S. corporations to supply troops with six bucks a pop Coca-Colas and contaminated water, opening the door to rapacious U.S. oil giants to suck up Iraq's vast untapped oil wealth, and of course scratching Israel's back.

Bush will soon be back at his own ranch searching among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy, but this turn of developments is particularly inconvenient for McCain, who in response to a question posed at a Council on Foreign Relations confab in 2004 regarding what should happen if a sovereign Iraq government asked the U.S. to withdraw its troops, said:

"Well, if that scenario evolves then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because -- if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. . . . I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."

McCain is pretty much at sea without cue cards, so this was a typically mumble-jumble response, but it was about as unambiguous as he gets.

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Sensing McCain's vulnerability, some pundits who are in his corner are suggesting that Al-Maliki is merely helping grease the skids for whomever succeeds The Decider.

Others are wishfully thinking that a new era of comity between Washington and Baghdad, relations between which have pinged and ponged between bad and worse over the past five-plus years, has commenced.

Still others trot out the tired canard that the U.S. has eschewed timetables to keep those Iraqi terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 from using a withdrawal to take down the Baghdad government, but now that we have "won" that is no longer a concern.

So if we have "won," then how can Barack Obama "lose" Iraq if he's elected? He can't, of course, because we haven't "won." The fuzzy logic of the pro-war crowd supposes that the terrorist threat will be eliminated and Iraq will become a Sunnybrook Farm, only with palm trees and lots of sand, if we stay just a little bit longer, and longer and . . .

These arguments ignore several realities:

* It would be a major setback for the Bush administration to accede to a security agreement under which Iraq would dictate what U.S. troops could and could not do. Does anyone really believe that it will? Of course not.

* While the Iraqis are capable of cutting off of their noses to spite their faces, they won't in this instance and any timetable will contain an escape clause to the effect that a full withdrawal is contingent on the ability of Iraqi forces to provide security.

* Al-Maliki knows that he needs the U.S. nanny for at least the near future, but he also is a politician and his timetable talk is primarily for domestic consumption to try to undercut his opponents' claims that he is too subservient to Washington.

McCain, however, is still in a pickle.

His initial response that the Iraqis hadn't said what they said about a withdrawal timetable didn't get any traction.

His second response was that maybe that's what they said but it's not what they meant because Al-Maliki has personally assured him many times that he wouldn't buy into a timetable.

Face it, McCain would rather undergo a colonoscopy than acknowledge anew that Iraq's national sovereignty is to be respected no matter what. And depending upon the number of years -- pick one between five and 100 for how long the U.S. stays, which have been his extremes -- he has been very clear that presence should be significant and not token.

So it will be curious to see whether he now flips or flops -- or does both -- since his 2004 vision sure doesn't square with his 2008 version.