By any reasonable measure, the debate over U.S. policy towards Iraq changed in a fundamental way yesterday. Just as importantly, the presidential campaign has experienced a game-changing moment, from which John McCain may struggle to recover.
Just as Barack Obama was poised to visit Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, unprompted, announced his belief that Obama’s withdrawal policy “would be the right time timeframe for a withdrawal,” and is “more realistic.” Maliki added that a McCain policy of “artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops” would “cause problems,” and concluded that Republican talking points in general are, at their core, mistaken: “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 that isn’t the case at all.”
In other words, the prime minister of Iraq thinks Obama’s right and McCain’s wrong.
McCain’s communications team isn’t necessarily the smoothest operation in politics, but even if it were, how, exactly, does one spin this? It’s not as if McCain can say Maliki hasn’t spent enough time on the ground in Iraq. What’s he going to do, call Maliki a cut-and-runner? (McCain can’t even question Maliki’s judgment, since he’s been praising the prime minister’s leadership.)
The whole point — literally, the entire argument — underpinning McCain’s policy is that U.S. troops need to stay in Iraq, indefinitely, in order to protect and support the sovereign, democratically-elected government of Iraq. And now, that sovereign, democratically-elected government of Iraq is telling John McCain, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Remember the “Crate-and-Barrel” “Pottery Barn” approach? We broke it, we bought it? Well, in this scenario, the store manager has effectively said, “Just get out.”
Josh Marshall explained, “Maliki has now handed Obama the trump card of all trump cards with which to parry all of McCain’s attacks.”
Or, as a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign told the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “We’re fucked.”
Now, McCain and the Bush administration aren’t about to take this lying down. A senior McCain official also told Ambinder, “[V]oters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” In other words, according to the McCain campaign, Americans shouldn’t care about the position of the democratically-elected leader of a sovereign country, who no longer wants 150,000 American troops in his country. Got it.
Of course, this might be more compelling if McCain hadn’t already stated his belief that “we would have to leave” if “an elected government of Iraq” asked us to.
The McCain campaign also indicated that Maliki’s praise for Obama’s policy is not to be taken too seriously, because it’s principally about “domestic politics.” In other words, Maliki is simply trying to boost his own standing in his own country by calling for withdrawal. But that’s a non-starter, too — as Matt Yglesias explained, “Even granting the premise that Maliki’s statements are purely about Iraqi domestic politics, all this amounts to is the fact that Barack Obama’s plan for Iraq is, according to both the Maliki government and the McCain campaign’s analysis, the only way forward that’s politically viable in Iraq.”
Not surprisingly, the Bush administration quickly leaned on Iraqi officials to walk Maliki’s remarks back, and soon after, the official retraction said Maliki’s comments were “were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.”
This, of course, is ridiculous. First, the statement did not point to a single error in the transcript. Not one. Second, Maliki made three separate comments about the superiority of Obama’s policy. Were they all the result of some kind of mistranslation? Third, if Maliki’s comments had been misunderstood, why didn’t the follow-up quote Maliki at all? And finally, the clarification was, humorously, published by the U.S. military’s Central Command press office, not the prime minister’s office. (“Basically, this morning we saw Maliki speaking in person and endorsing Obama’s plan to end the occupation in no uncertain terms. By the late afternoon, an Iraqi government spokesman was pretending this never happened in a statement released by the occupying army.”)
To consider just how significant yesterday’s development are, consider the inverse. Ezra noted:
Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, “at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves.” It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about “Obama’s Iraq Problem.” Obama would probably lose the race. Instead, the opposite happened.
John McCain has been losing the presidential race in large part because voters question his positions on economic and domestic policy. This, of course, makes yesterday’s developments all the more devastating — on his signature issue, the government McCain wants to protect has said McCain has it backwards.
It leaves McCain in an impossible position — effectively arguing, “Never mind what the American people, the Iraqi people, and the duly elected Iraqi government think. And never mind how wrong I was about the war every step of the way for six years. What matters is that everyone ignore the prime minister of Iraq and listen only to me.”
As for Obama, in the last 10 days, McCain has endorsed Obama’s Afghanistan policy; Bush has endorsed Obama’s Iran policy; and Maliki has endorsed Obama’s Iraq policy.
Not bad for a rookie.