President Bush sticks his fingers in his ears and pretends not to hear Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki say he liked Obama's plan for withdrawal from Iraq:

"I talk to him all the time, and that's not what I heard," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post aboard Air Force One on the start of a trip to Asia. "I heard a man who wants to work with the United States to come up with a rational way to have the United States withdraw combat troops depending upon conditions on the ground, that's all."

Tim questions whether I can really discern the true motives behind Obama's support for an escalation of troop levels in Afghanistan. The short answer is no, I'm not a mind reader. But I disagree with Tim's point that an Obama reversal on the subject "wouldn't be a hard sell". Voters may be ambivalent on Afghanistan, but they're equally ambivalent on Obama's ability to handle national security issues. The popular support for withdrawal from Iraq isn't present with Afghanistan.