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.<\/p>\n
Just as Barack Obama was poised to visit Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, unprompted, announced his belief<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n In other words, the prime minister of Iraq thinks Obama’s right and McCain’s wrong.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Remember the Josh Marshall explained<\/a>, “Maliki has now handed Obama the trump card of all trump cards with which to parry all of McCain’s attacks.”<\/p>\n Or, as a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign told the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “We’re fucked<\/a>.” Of course, this might be more compelling if McCain hadn’t already stated his belief<\/a> that “we would have to leave” if “an elected government of Iraq” asked us to.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, “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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.” <\/p>\n 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<\/i> 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<\/a> in a statement released by the occupying army<\/i>.”)<\/p>\n“Crate-and-Barrel”<\/strike> “Pottery Barn” approach? We broke it, we bought it? Well, in this scenario, the store manager has effectively said, “Just get out.”<\/p>\n
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\nNow, McCain and the Bush administration aren’t about to take this lying down. A senior McCain official also told Ambinder<\/a>, “[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.<\/p>\n