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.

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.