One Month Later
I just got an email from an advocacy group about what they rightly term “The Elephant Still Very Much in the Room” — the fact that it was one month ago today that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he wanted the United States to negotiate a timetable for withdrawing forces from Iraq that would have its endpoint somewhere in 2010. As readers will be aware, I favored taking steps along those lines before Maliki ever said he did and still think that would be the right thing to do even if Maliki were saying he wants an open-ended American presence. But I simply do not understand how the anti-timetable argument stays viable in the face of that particular turn in Iraqi politics, especially because Maliki’s main domestic opponents tend to be even firmer on their desire for an American withdrawal.
In a sane world, Maliki’s call would have transformed the Iraq debate in U.S. politics. But in part because it’s not a sane world and in part because of, I guess, tactical failures on the part of Democratic Party politicians it doesn’t seem to have done so yet. But really it was a huge deal that got some coverage at the time but still hasn’t had the sort of profound impact it deserves.
22 Responses to “One Month Later”
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August 19th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
“Not a sane world” – you pull your punches. It’s not a sane NATION – the U.S.A., of course – please don’t blame the rest of the world for OUR inanity. There are times in world history when whole nations go insane. This is one of them, and I hope and pray that the world recognizes this, and takes the appropriate action of banding together to oppose and, ultimately, utterly defeat the monstrosity that this nation has become.
August 19th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
MattY to World: “This is not how it should work!”
World to MattY: “Frankly my dear . . .”
August 19th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I never understood why this would be a big deal in terms of the Presidential election. People voting for president in this country don’t know and/or don’t care what Maliki says.
You have to remember that most people are not well informed and also not terribly bright.
August 19th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
You mean you’re giving the elephant a goddamn peanut?
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/07/giving-elephant-goddamn-peanut.html
August 19th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I disagree that it hasn’t changed the debate. It has. Now McCain is focusing far more on Obama being “wrong” about the surge, and far less on the need to stay til 2050. You or I might not like that change, but it certainly is change.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Reminds me of John Travolta’s line in “Swordfish”:
Gabriel: Have you ever heard of Harry Houdini? Well he wasn’t like today’s magicians who are only interested in television ratings. He was an artist. He could make an elephant disappear in the middle of a theater filled with people, and do you know how he did that? Misdirection.
Stanley: What the fuck are you talking about?
Gabriel: Misdirection. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.
Bottom line: It’s not hard to misdirect the US electorate.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Almost nobody in the US cares about what the Iraqis think so it is hard to see why you think this should be a huge deal.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
LarryM -
You crystal my thoughts exactly.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Note that was a month ago and since then there has been mention of a near agreement, then nothing. We will stall and stall and stall on that till after the election. Then something will be announced, including numbers in several years so it won’t feel like withdrawal. Then such can be stretched out anyway, particularly with the large airbases. Which we will never leave. We need those to cover Russia’s southern flank don’t you know.
Maliki himself tried to walk it back a bit at the time too. It might be his policy but he isn’t going to shout it from the rooftops. He might if there were going to be elections but those are nowhere to be seen now. Funny that.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:08 am
There’s a huge danger for Obama in setting a standard whereby his Iraq policy is driven by al-Maliki’s statements. If Obama campaigns hard on al-Maliki’s approval of an Obama-like plan for withdrawal and in fact uses al-Maliki’s approval as evidence for why he has the best plan, he could set himself up for trouble should al-Maliki inconveniently have a change of heart.
There are any number of reasons al-Maliki might change his mind — the most obvious is if he decides to maintain his leadership of Iraq in the absence of a popular mandate (in which case he’d no longer need to hold the popular position of wanting America out) with the aid of American support for an unpopular government. The fluidity of the statements coming out of his office circa the timetable comment shows that Obama can’t rely on al-Maliki to be consistent in his support of American withdrawal today let alone hold that position months from now.
Despite worries to the contrary, Obama’s still in an overwhelmingly strong position, and hinging his success on the rhetorical consistency of someone who he has no reason to trust is exactly the sort of risk he shouldn’t take. Rather, he should emphasize his consistent opposition to the war before it happened (particularly recalling his prescient predictions and contrasting them with McCain’s) now, and only hit hard on the incompatibility between McCain’s plans for Iraq and Iraqis’ plans for Iraq in the waning days of the campaign, when the latter is less subject to inconvenient change.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Zach is correct, IMHO. Obama cannot lean too hard on al-Maliki’s statements because of the non-trivial risk that al-Maliki will suddenly change positions (for whatever reason) and kick Obama’s legs out from under him.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
It isn’t hard to understand how McCain and his supporters wished away Maliki’s statements–they just claimed no matter what he said, if it contradicted what they wanted him to say, he didn’t really mean it.
It remains to be seen whether that will work on a broader basis, however. I agree with Zach to a certain extent, but I also think that during the debates Obama will start making the argument that McCain’s policies are contrary to the judgment of the Iraqis themselves. Maliki’s statements might still be used as a data point, but for the reasons Zach describes, I doubt Obama will want to place too much emphasis on Maliki as an individual. Instead, Obama will likely emphasize things that would be harder to reverse, such as the rejection by the Iraqis of the Bush Administration’s SOFA proposals.
Which is not to say this prior episode was irrelevant. If things go down more or less like I expect, the media will widely accept Obama’s claim that the Iraqis support his position, and I think that will be because of the Maliki episode permanently changing the conventional wisdom on this subject in Obama’s favor.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Thanks for highlighting something that’s pretty interesting. Now that I think about it, the impact of al-Maliki’s statements, and of Obama’s international trip overall, was not what one might expect: up to and during that trip, McCain and his people couldn’t talk enough about the surge, how successful the Iraq war was, etc., etc., and his statements (and various debates about the issues) got what I recall was a good deal of coverage: the media paid a good deal of attention.
Then Maliki came out with his German interview, and a few days later his government confirmed that this was their negotiating position…and since then, a veil of silence has descended. Iraq, it seems, has vanished from the American media landscape as an issue, while instead we discuss ‘celebrity’. Even McCain himself — not, by all accounts, the most disciplined candidate — has managed to utterly stop talking about Iraq and the surge, though he does regularly call Obama a traitor for wanting to the US to lose…(lose what? oh, something, you know….whatever).
If one believed in a great right-wing media conspiracy,* this pattern would make an awful lot of sense. When Maliki’s statements and the general success of Obama’s trip (in that he looked ‘presidential’) were clear, the media promptly stopped running stories on Iraq. (One can’t blame this entirely on the Georgia crisis, though of course both the situation in Georgia and the Olympics did suck up a lot of media oxygen — since this all happened well after the apparent veil of silence dropped.)
—–
*I don’t — honest — though I think we underestimate the extent of outright corporate management of the content of the ‘news’ media.
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