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DENVER, Colo. — How many different ways does this ruin John McCain?
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq by 2011 as he embarked Monday on an attempt to win support among Iraqi leaders for a draft security accord with the United States.
Maliki’s comments appeared to be an attempt to extract further concessions from American officials, less than a week after both sides said they had agreed to remove all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011, if the security situation remained relatively stable, but leave other American forces in place. The U.S. plan is to leave as many as 40,000 troops to continue to assist Iraq in training, logistics and intelligence for an undefined period.
I have to run to do an interview with Danish TV — stop snickering — so more on this later. But this also allows Barack Obama a face-saving way to pivot to advocating full withdrawal, without a residual force. If the Iraqi government we’re ostensibly there to support says "Take all your dudes and get the hell on," you can’t really say no to that, leaving aside the question of whether you’d want to.
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If Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders insist on not only withdrawal by a date certain, but a complete withdrawal, this would be based-loaded home run for the US, internationally but especially domestically.
The Dems and Repubs will likely never agree on a withdrawal strategy (and degree of withdrawal), absent outside pressure/requirement. The Repubs will claim ANY post-withdrawal disturbance as the Dems losing the war, just as in Vietnam – and they’ll be talking about it hysterically for 50 years.
So, you can’t ‘lose’ a war if you are complying with the demands of the Iraqi government and people – to argue otherwise is to state baldly that you don’t believe the Iraqis should have sovereignty and choose their own destiny. Both McCain and Bush seem to believe in the ‘we know better than they do’ approach, but they hide under the spin that Maliki is being misunderstood somehow. The stronger Maliki states their position the more difficult that misunderstood claim to hold up.
I see this, if it plays out as currently scripted by Iraq, as the best way and perhaps the only way that the US can avoid decades of partisan domestic struggle. It will be interesting to see if the ‘final’ agreement is in line with current words, and will be even more interesting to see if Bush/McCain will accept the verdict – and whether Obama embraces this offer of domestic political salvation for the US.
The fly in the ointment: Maliki & Co seem intent on overplaying their hand and forcing the Sunnis and Kurds into military/terror revolt by not accepting multi-party government and military. This could re-ignite the ‘insurgency’ and allow the US neo-cons to bully Obama (or reinvigorate McCain, if he wins) into a staycation in Iraq for years beyond 2011.
Hmmm. I see a hunting trip with Cheney in Mr. Maliki’s future.
@jimportlandor
“,,,don’t believe that the Iraqis should have sovereignty and choose their own destiny.”
Certain events in the last several years have led me to suspect that people in the US govt., some holding high office, don’t trust the Iraqis to govern beneficently.