Black Box Report

When it comes to a policy on Iraq, the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama couldn't be more distinct. McCain wants to stay until an as-yet-undefined victory has been achieved. Obama wants to leave in roughly 16 months, and that will be victory enough. This weekend, as Obama prepared to embark on his Mideast trip, Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki essentially cut McCain's talking points off at the knees:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

(Sound of needle scratching across the record)

Asked if he supported Obama's ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.

"Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems."

Now which presidential candidate would that be? But wait, it gets even better:

"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn't," Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Ouch.

The Keystone Cops routine that followed was just as interesting, if not at all surprising. CENTCOM issued a release on behalf of the Prime Minister claiming Maliki had been “misunderstood and mistranslated.” What the mistakes were, no one would say. What Maliki supposedly actually said, no one knows. But rest assured, the Iraqi Prime Minister didn’t actually say that.

Except Der Spiegel stood by their story. An independent translation passed inspection. And two days later, Iraqi officials agreed, setting a goal of American troop withdrawal by the end of 2010, mere months difference from Obama’s stated goal.

It’s hard to underestimate how this changes the entire playing field of the presidential campaign. At the Atlantic, conservative blogger Marc Ambinder calls a game changer:

This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? To argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing.

Indeed. As Ambinder related in a later post, a Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign told him in an email, "We’re f***ed." And whether or not Maliki meant to act as an influence on American politics or was just reflecting his own political reality, either way, Maliki has put McCain between a rock and a hard place:

Either (McCain) 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.

Unpopular here and in Iraq, hence Maliki's unprompted endorsement of Obama's time line table “horizon.” So what does McCain do? To get the ball rolling he went on the Today Show and said he and Gen. Petraeus know what's better for Iraq than the wogs and their democratically elected leader.

Q: If the Iraqi government were to say, if you were president, ‘we want a timetable for troops being removed,’ would you agree to that?

McCAIN: I’ve been there too many times. I’ve met too many times with him. And I know what they want. They want it based on conditions. And of course they’d like to have us out. That’s what happens when you win wars.

Even Hot Air calls the response tone deaf:

Where he gets in trouble is in his answer to the direct question about Maliki, dismissing the Spiegel interview by insisting “I know what they want” and thereby somehow managing to sound both arrogant and in denial at the same time...
...Suggesting that he, from his U.S. enclave, knows "what Iraqis want" more so than the prime minister is only going to make this worse.

Too late. Never ones particularly good at impulse control when it comes to their plans falling apart like wet Kleenex, the rightwing blogosphere is already making room for Maliki under the bus:

We should tell Maliki, loudly and in public, that he owes his job to us, and that further prosecution of our military operations in his country will be conducted with regard only to U.S. interests, as determined in consensus by our established domestic political processes. And if he doesn't like that, he can go to hell.

Perhaps now would be a good time for a refresher on the definition of “sovereignty.”

OK, maybe not. But since these Iraqis never did come through with those flowers and candy for our gracious act of invading, crippling and occupying their country...Have we mentioned how shifty the guy is?

As I've mentioned before, Maliki, of the Shiite Dawa Party which opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place, has long-standing ties to Iran and Syria — and has expressed support for Hezbollah. The only thing that surprises me about this story is that anyone is surprised.

Nope. No surprise here. What Digby D-Day said:

There's just no way to spin this. Regardless of Maliki's motives, this is a total rejection of the McCain conservative position on Iraq. They never wanted to "win," they wanted to stay. And they are being told they have to leave.

Considering this effectively neuters McCain's position on Iraq and leaves him with...what, the economy? It's hard to see how this could be much worse for him.

But good news for the rest of us:

What's truly amazing about this turn of events is that it more and more looks like the Prime Minister of Iraq is going to help engineer regime change back in the US.

Regime change you can believe in.