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Apropos of the last post, we can now say: Mystery solved. There is no Maliki walkback. Instead, today brought a big step forward, with the Iraqi government's latest footfall landing squarely on the throat of the McCain campaign:
Iraq's government spokesman is hopeful that U.S. combat forces could be out of the country by 2010.Ali al-Dabbagh made the comments following a meeting in Baghdad on Monday between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day.The timeframe is similar to Obama's proposal to pull back combat troops within 16 months. The Iraqi government has been trying to clarify its position on a possible troop withdrawal since al-Maliki was quoted in a German magazine last week saying he supported Obama's timetable.It's not similar. It's identical. January 2009, plus 16 months, puts you in May 2010. As Spencer writes, "There's nowhere left for McCain to go here. Either he endorses a timetable for withdrawal, which he has consistently said would be a disaster, and cedes his only big issue to Obama -- and more importantly, concedes that Obama's judgment is sound -- or he deliberately ignores the concerted, expressed wishes of the Iraqi government in order to prolong an unpopular war."From watching the cable shows this morning, the McCain campaign's spin is that this just proves McCain was right about the surge, and Obama was wrong. It doesn't prove that, but even if it did, it doesn't help McCain. Because it also proves that in the central Iraq question of this election, Obama was right and McCain was wrong. The McCain camp is left arguing that their candidate was the right guy for the job in 2005, while Obama is better suited to lead America's Iraq policy in 2009. Past vs. future indeed.
