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At first glance, the agreement Friday between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government to set "time horizons" for a withdrawal of U.S. troops steers American policy toward that of Democrat Barack Obama. But the campaign of John McCain has done as much as it can to steer the development to the Republican's favor.
It was Obama, not Bush or McCain, who wanted a timetable for troop withdrawal, a notion also recently backed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The "time horizon" agreement is less firm, but certainly more like the Obama/al-Maliki position than the GOP had previously taken. In that regard, the agreement has strong elements of a win for Obama.
On the other hand, after an initially muddled response to al-Maliki's call for timetables, the McCain campaign has found a line of attack that at least is somewhat credible. That is: None of this would have been possible without the success of the troop surge that McCain backed and Obama opposed. It's a point of sensitivity for the Obama camp, as the removal from his website of previous, unflattering remarks about the surge indicate.
That al-Maliki never, to my knowledge, mentioned the surge's success as a reason he wanted a timetable -- press accounts show him mentioning a desire for full Iraqi sovereignty and resistance to administration demands on a status of force agreement, plus there is some speculated re-election pressure -- doesn't help the McCain camp's argument. But perhaps a different security situation would not have led al-Maliki to place less of an emphasis on full Iraqi sovereignty, etc. At any rate, it's better than what McCain's camp had been saying, or an advertisement that the Boston Globe somewhat debunked, or criticizing Obama's Iraq trip -- a trip that McCain pushed. |
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