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(Update II) McCain Screws The Pooch On Iraq

July 22nd, 2008
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist

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After months of peddling a position on the Iraq war that has included an American troop presence anywhere from 100 years down to five years as he has had to repeatedly backpedal, John McCain now finds himself marginalized with Nouri Al-Maliki and Barack Obama, of all people, stealing his thunder on his war.

The presumptive Republican nominee already was on shaky ground by making the “success” of the Surge his major Iraq talking point and declaring the war “won” but offering only an ambiguous plan for ending American involvement.

The Surge has indeed been a success militarily, but the window of opportunity it provided for Prime Minister Al-Maliki and his fellow Shiites to work things out with the Sunnis has not produced major progress and now all-important provincial elections in the fall may be in peril. Besides which, that’s all so yesterday in the 24/7 world of news.

Today’s news is how isolated McCain seems to have become after Al-Maliki endorsed Obama’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops in 16 months or so as pretty much resembling his own in an interview with a German magazine.

This tempest might have passed relatively quickly, but the only effort at a retraction was issued not by the Iraqis but by the military press office of the American occupiers, while a translation of what Al-Maliki said clearly showed who his horse is in the presidential race.

If that was not bad enough for McCain, Al-Maliki made no bones about where his sentiments lie as the man with the plan got the red-carpet treatment when he stopped by the PM’s office in the Green Zone yesterday en route to what is shaping up to be a hugely enthusiastic reception in Europe.

McCain settled for a trip to the Poppy Zone, the Maine home of former President George H.W. Bush, where he glowered for the cameras and chewed on his ever handy supply of sour grapes.

But while McCain is screwing the pooch on Iraq, he is fortunate that few Americans will notice. Obama still has an uphill fight to convince voters that he has foreign policy and national security cred, and events on the ground in Iraq could unravel quickly, which would play to McCain. And although some commentators are calling Al-Maliki’s endorsement the biggest development of the campaign, let’s not forget that he is a scumbag of the first water, and is using Obama to his own advantage. And vise versa, of course.

In any event, a funny thing is happening on the way to November: Obama seems more like the realist when it comes to the war than does McCain, who must be struggling hard to suppress his imperialistic instincts.

The hateful John Derbyshire, who reliably unloads buckets of bile over those ungrateful Iraqis, might well have been reading McCain’s mind when he penned this screed over at The Corner:

“Now that our American blood and money has seen off most of the enemies of Maliki and his Iranian pals, it is perfectly natural for them to believe they can finish the job themselves, without further assistance from us. Maliki can now afford to start putting distance between himself and the U.S.A. — essential for political viability in a region where the U.S.A. is pretty generally hated.

“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.”

Meanwhile, in a delicious sideshow to all of this, The New York Times has rejected a McCain response to Obama’s recent op-ed piece laying out his Iraq withdrawal plan because it merely was a critique of Obama’s views. Times opinion page editor David Shipley told the McCain campaign that he would be pleased to look at another draft.

A campaign spokesman, conveniently and convincingly missing the point, harrumphed that McCain wasn’t going to change his position on Iraq because of The Times‘ “demands.”

Ahem.

Pool photograph by Thaier al-Sudani



This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under Withdrawal, The New York Times, Newsweek Blogitics, Iraq War, Surge, Nouri al-Maliki, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, John McCain, George H.W. Bush, 2008 Elections. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 21 Comments

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    Since McCain has zero chance of winning, who cares what is positions are or what he is saying.

    If Shaun was honest, he would make a long post looking at the overall foreign policy position of the next president, Senator McCain. My guess is that Shaun will say that he positions are perfect and nothing could possibly go wrong.
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    New York Times to Senator McCain:

    Surges? We don't need no stinkin' surges.
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    It's just a copycat form of Bush-bashing. Shaun may really believe the Big Lie that McCain is another Dubya. (And no, McCain's visit to Dubya's "courageous" no-tax pledge-breaking father does not change that. It doesn't even necessarily cause us to suspect the GOP remains dysfunctional and that we'd see retreads once again in a McCain administration. McCain is just dredging a dysfunctional GOP for whatever support he can get. "Please, Mr. President 41. Please say I remind you of President Reagan at a press conference.")
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    Of course SEnator Obama has an entire set of foreign policy proposals that Shaun will never discuss. See http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/
    I wonder how shaun reconciles the call for the U.S. to abandon Iraq in 2006 with Senator Obama's plan to involve in the U.S. in Darfur but not involve the U.S. in Zimbabwe?

    Eventually foreign policy has to go beyond telling people what they want to hear. Senator Obama has not reached that point yet and progressive blogers definitely are not going to talk about it.

    I guess the daily bashing of Senator McCain when he has zero chance of being president makes up for the obtuseness of refusing to look at the policy proposals on Senator Obama. When I looked at them, the appeared to have been written by the screen writers of the West Wing.
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    "New York Times to Senator McCain: "

    Of course we're going to play games with you. We're the Dems' flagship! This Democratic campaigning we're doing is for real. Screw you, McCain and other Republicans. We hate you.

    * * *

    Time to put it away instantly. Superdestroyer, Shaun with his Bush-bashing and weak copycat McCain-bashing should be put in charge of McCain's dysfunctional campaign. McCain has blamed Obama for the recent rise in motor vehicle fuel prices. That's standard operating procedure with Shaun. Obama should be blamed for Bhutto's assassination, too, along with anything that goes wrong either in Iraq or Afghanistan, if Shaun were to be hired to do what he does routinely here, for McCain's campaign. It's the same thing Shaun does with Bush every day.

    BAM! ... phlopp
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    "McCain has zero chance of winning"

    I was listening last night to lefty talk radio. In the afternoon-evening that station presents what sounds like the audio presentation of a television political news program. Everyone on that show last night, liberal and (what seemed to be) conservative commentators, were agreed that McCain's campaign currently is disastrous. Blaming Obama for high fuel prices? (the kind of ridiculous thing Shaun does all the time with Bush and now sometimes with McCain) Everyone was laughing at how pathetic that was. McCain really is plodding and muddling along and is going to effectively rely on what anti-Obama votes may come his way from swing voters in addition to those of very suspicious, wary, unsupportive truly conservative voters. McCain has to select a conservative as his VP or he may as well concede, forfeit, resign at any time. He's probably going to choose some GOP establishment guy instead; he may have been going over a list of candidates with the elder Bush.
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    DLS,

    What the Republicans should do in Minneapolis is decide that Senator McCain is a massive disaster and open the convention up to nominating someone who actually is a Republican. Of course, the next day Shaun would have a post linking the new candidate to the Bush Administration and repeating his mantra of Cheney, corruption, and low poll numbers.
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    And he'd betray his overt bias once more by posting another photo of Obama when bashing McCain.
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    Looks like McCain isn't the only one chewing on sour grapes.
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