Obama-Maliki '08

There's been much ado about Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's interview with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel about a timeframe for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Here's the key text:

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. 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.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.

SPIEGEL: In your opinion, which factor has contributed most to bringing calm to the situation in the country?

Maliki: There are many factors, but I see them in the following order. First, there is the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve in central Iraq. This has enabled us, above all, to pull the plug on al-Qaida. Second, there is the progress being made by our security forces. Third, there is the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida and the militias. Finally, of course, there is the economic recovery.

P.M. Maliki is, like Senators Obama and McCain, immersed in the implications of upcoming elections in the fall and deep anti-U.S. occupation sentiment among his electorate when he makes public pronouncements on the war. Nothing he says to the press isn't colored by politics and appearances. So we're looking at a landscape not just of Obama '08, or McCain '08, but Maliki '08 as well.

The Iraqi government has vaquely backpedaled from Maliki's comment, but it has issued no specifics on what he said off-the-cuff that was inconsistent with his "official" views. That the "official" statement was released through the U.S. military command office in Baghdad says more than the statement itself. It was a "non-denial denial", which usually means that what was said reflected the speaker's thinking, although he wants to back off of responsibility for its specific implications. Sometimes this is a calculated position. Sometimes its recognition of a "gaffe" that might have more diplomatically formulated. In any event, the "correction" didn't actually correct anything, other than attempt to make the impression left by the comments more diffuse. But there are several things worth noting about the Maliki interview.

First, Maliki raised Obama's 16 month timetable as a good benchmark for withdrawal - he wasn't prodded into discussing Obama's plan by the interviewer. So it is clearly consistent with Maliki's general thinking on the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq. (Or to be more cynical, referencing Obama was part of a strategy to embarrass Bush, given Washington's intransigence in dealing with the Iraqi government on a forward plan for the U.S. presence.)

Second, in discussing reasons for decrease in violence in Iraq Maliki doesn't invoke the surge. He puts the shift among Sunni insurgents against al Qaeda - which had nothing to do with the surge - as the biggest factor. Al Qaeda's overreach, inflaming sectarian violence as a strategy, ultimately worked against them. It wasn't hard to predict that the folks who would ultimately become al Qaeda's worst enemies were the Sunni tribesmen themselves, once al Qaeda was no longer useful to them or overplayed their hand within the insurgency. Bribes, not more American troops, were the key to this "victory."

Maliki doesn't address the fact that the growth of anti-war sentiment in the U.S. and revulsion at the idea of continuing to occupy the country indefinitely has converged with sentiment among growing numbers of Iraqis. But he clearly recognizes that a politics of reconciliation and negotiation, not more aggressive military tactics or endless perpertuation of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, is the key to Iraq's future. Unfortunately, it must be said, the actual decrease in sectarian violence is largely a measure of the "success" of the tactic. The demographic map has already been re-drawn in many parts of Iraq. In the wake of killings and millions of refugees from the terror, sectarian divisions are more embedded than ever. Whether, in the wake of this tragedy, some form of political rapproachment can be pulled from the fire is an open question. Some small steps in the direction of political pragmatism seem to be taking hold in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

The overriding fact of the matter is that the U.S. is not a welcome presence in Iraq and the Iraqi population is terribly weary of a war that was imposed on them by Washington. John McCain and Barack Obama represent polar opposites on the wisdom and conduct of the occupation of Iraq. That the Iraqi Prime Minister, on his own initiative, would invoke Obama as being closer to his own thinking about the near-term future of his country than John "100 years of Occupation" McCain is remarkable. Iraq has been McCain's signature issue in the current campaign. To boil this down to the pure politics, if it appears he's running not just against Obama, but against Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki on this issue - to quote one of the McCain campaign's own strategists when asked about the Maliki comment - John McCain is "f..ked."