Iraqi Consensus For U.S. Withdrawal Date?

By Cernig

Negotiations between Iraq and the U.S. for a set of agreements to replace the UN mandate and preserve the occupation's legitimacy are getting interesting. Spencer Ackerman writes that, in the last two days, Maliki, national-security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie and now perhaps even Ayatollah Sistani have said any deal must contain "obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops' withdrawal from Iraq".

Spencer asks "is the world making sense for a change?" before also noting that in the past fleeting glimpses of Iraqi government backbone have always been walked back. I guess we'll see.

This makes for a bit of a quandary for the McCain camp if it pans out, though. On the one hand he's said, loudly, that the U.S. will stay in Iraq for years to come and that the war in Iraq isn't won by a long chalk yet - the Bush administration's "long war" meme. On the other hand, he's also said he'd respect Iraqi sovereignty and that U.S. troops should leave if the Iraqi government wants them to. Obama, on the other hand, would end up looking like the guy with the most recent "good judgement" in seeing that withdrawal was not only possible but necessary to give the Iraqis their own country back.