Over the past several months, the reductions in violence associated with the administration's post-midterm change in tactics in Iraq have proven more durable than many liberals (myself included) anticipated. Consequently, the press and the right have issued a steady drumbeat demanding that Barack Obama drop his support for a phased withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq on a 16-month timeline.
"Mr. Obama can't afford to update his Iraq policy," sniffed a July 7 Washington Post editorial that simultaneously accused Obama of changing his position on Iraq and of not changing his position on Iraq enough. By July 15 it was clear that Obama was sticking to his guns, and the Post was mad, sneering that Obama "appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq." Similar sentiments have been echoed on television and, of course, by the McCain campaign which deemed it "remarkable" that Obama "articulated and announced his policies and approach to Iraq before he went, not after."
But a funny thing happened while Obama's plane was en route to its first stop in Afghanistan -- Der Spiegel published an interview with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in which the Iraqi leader took a rather different view. "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months," he observed, "that, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."
Politically, Maliki's statement is devastating for John McCain, who has endorsed an American presence in Iraq for 100 years or more. And, further, McCain has repeatedly argued that any fixed timeline (or, indeed, any policy based on the idea of leaving Iraq to the Iraqis) would constitute a form of surrender.
But there is a larger problem for Obama's critics -- the Iraqi embrace of something like Obama's schedule highlights the foolishness of condemning a 16-month timetable as arbitrary. The 16 month figure, of course, is somewhat arbitrary. But that is simply in the nature of any schedule -- shift things around a month or a week or a day or an hour in one direction or another and it probably wouldn't make much of a difference.
What's not arbitrary is the difference between having a schedule and not having one. On a schedule, the goal of our Iraq policy is to find a reasonable means of extricating ourselves from an awful position and leaving Iraq's fate in Iraq's hands. Without a schedule, the goal of our Iraq policy is to stay in Iraq indefinitely in defiance of the wishes of the American and Iraqi people alike.
Both Obama and Maliki understand this distinction. Obama has spoken of the need to "refine" his plan in accordance with new information and events on the ground. Maliki endorses Obama's broad framework but speaks of "the possibility of slight changes." The tactical specifics, however, are less important than the broad strategic framework. Over the past several months Maliki and other Iraqi officials have repeatedly hinted at support for a timetable, and invariably their statements have been walked back to some extent.
And so it was unsurprising that by Saturday afternoon a strange non-denial denial was released through U.S. Central Command making vague references to mistranslation, supposedly by Maliki's own interpreter. But on Monday morning the same spokesman who issued the quasi-retraction reaffirmed the Iraqi government's desire for American forces to leave sometime during 2010 -- exactly what Obama's 16-month timetable would do. This back-and-forth shows us the real post-surge shape of the political debate -- a tug-o-war between the imperial fantasies of the American right, and the joint desire of the Iraqi and American people to end U.S. military involvement in Iraq. Maliki, after all, has good reason to believe that a timeline would best serve his interests. It's clear that he would like some measure of continued American military support. But the American military doesn't want to give that support without an agreement with Iraq that continues to grant our forces broad immunity from Iraqi law and discretion in their conduct.
Both are understandable positions, but for the Iraqis the indefinite presence on their soil of a foreign army unaccountable to Iraqi law is a recipe for an open-ended occupation and a neocolonial relationship with the United States. The solution, from an Iraqi perspective, is a fixed schedule for withdrawal that will buy the Iraq government continued military support on terms that are acceptable to the Pentagon while also asserting Iraqi sovereignty. A schedule would allow the United States to help finish off the Iraq situation as best we can, while freeing up resources that can better be used elsewhere.
Conservatives like Bush and McCain used to acknowledge that if Iraq's leaders want us to leave, we have to leave. More recently, McCain's been singing a new tune, claiming to know what Maliki really wants irrespective of what he says, and suggesting that the only thing that really matters is what Gen. David Petraeus says. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's success in getting Maliki to back away from his own policies shows that a President McCain could probably prevail upon Maliki to accept indefinite occupation. That, in turn, gives the Iraqi leader one more reason to do what he can during the campaign to lend a helping hand to Obama and a strategy of separation.
