He’s my candidate, but nobody bats 1.000 in that league. The test of any candidate is if s/he’s prepared to acknowledge and rectify the mistake.

The “success” of the surge is more complex right now than what McCain is making it out to be. The “success” of the surge has also made the political situation in Iraq an extremely intriguing affair right now.

First, the surge was designed to do one thing: to quell violence in Baghdad. This was supposed to have given Maliki political room to pull together his government and accomplish a set number of targeted goals. And violence is down in Iraq overall, which is a good thing. The problem is, a large reason that violence is down in addition to additional troops is our having made the decision to pay off Iraqi militia and “death squads” to keep them from attacking us and other targets we deem important. While this tactic has lowered violence, we’ll have to wait to see if this was a wise investment long-term, or if we just lined the pockets of militias who have no interest in working with the Iraqi government after we leave. Either way, we can’t babysit the government forever to find out.

Also, despite being a tactical military success, the surge hasn’t payed off politically. At least, not the way we had hoped it would. The majority of the Iraqi government’s checkpoints remain incomplete, or completed below standard. Meanwhile, large swaths of Maliki’s government, including Shiite and Kurd coalitions, have either walked away or been driven out. Despite this, Maliki likely considers himself in a stronger political position than he did a year back, which is probably one of the reasons that he’s started floating timelines to Western press. This goes against Bush’s wishes, but just highlights that the Iraqi Prime Minister is acting more and more in his own interests.

Iraq is very complicated. To argue that “the surge worked” ignores a hell of a lot of other factors currently going on in the area. I won’t even touch what factor Iranian influence is having in this. What the surge likely did was make Maliki’s political position a bit safer, and since Bush has tied his Iraqi ship to Maliki, I guess he’s getting what he wanted. However, there’s a lot more to this story left to be written. The question that we need to ask ourself is, is it in our best interests to continue to try to fight this out militarily. Anyone who knows anyone who’s been deployed over the past 18 months knows that we can’t keep up the “surge” for very much longer. Is this a winnable battle?

The only thing we know for sure right now is that there is not going to be a new agreement with Iraq allowing our forces to stay in country long-term, so the only way we stay there is to topple another Iraqi government. John McCain might think that we can take a mulligan on the Iraq war, and do it right this time, but that’s not the way things work. If Maliki says leave, either we officially become occupiers and all that entails, or leave and figure out our best way forward.

Sorry for the long post, but this “surge” business needs some clearing up.

However, the presidential campaign requires clear-cut positions; anything else leaves a candidate open to ‘waffling’. Right now, al-Maliki wants a commitment for US troops to leave. It’s not clear if this is tactical or based on principle, but either way, his views are more congruent with what seems to be Obama’s position than with McCain, who is joined at the hip with the Bush position.

(Digression - who really knows what the administration position is week to week? They continue to emanate gaseous clouds of neo-con belligerence while migrating under cover towards a more rational policy, witness negotiating with Iran.) ,

But Obama is a pragmatist. Much of the criticism of his shift to the center revolved around his comment that the actual pace of withdrawal will depend on the input he receives from commanders on the ground. What if Petraeus or his successor were to tell him that al-Qaeeda in Iraq was making major inroads against an Iraqi army that was incapable of dealing with it on its own? And how does al-Maliki’s position square with Obama’s view that there likely will be a residual force to address problems like this, and to seal the Iranian border? Will his noted pragmatism and willingness to adjust policy based on developing facts ensnare him in accusations that he’s pandering? He can’t afford to lock himself into an outright commitment in the face of a fluid and unclear future.

To be fair minded about this, Obama was wrong on the surge. His original view I believe was that we shouldn’t even try it, because we’d get enmeshed in sectarian violence, and we’d be far worse off after 6-12 months of this than we were a year ago. Well, the surge seems to have worked to some extent at a tactical level, although it’s far from clear that there has been the political progress towards reconciliation that W predicted. Its also far from clear whether we’ve created a strong enough infrastructure to resist a re-emergence of violence once we withdraw. Even so, if you’re keeping score, Obama isn’t batting too much over .300 on these issues, probably a result of trying to hold the Dem Left in place during the primaries.

McCain’s problems are equally daunting. He began by linking himself with the Bush surge policy, and relying on the face that it has at least temporarily suppressed violence, but insists that we have to be prepared for a long-term presence in Iraq, presumably at a substantial level. This may reflect as much a desire to create a new counter-balance to neighboring Iran (replacing Saddam Hussein) as a concern about continuing violence in Iraq; remember, Lieberman is his eminence grise.

In any event, after having said he’d be responsive to Iraqi wishes, he’s now hearing that Iraq wants us out on an Obama timetable, not on his 100 year plan. He’s had to fall in behind Obama in saying we need to increase our presence in Afghanistan and deal with the Pakistani tribal areas, which Obama has been pushing as a priority for a while. I suspect that as time goes on, the consensus will be that Iraq was a digression, and that McCain’s belated enthusiasm for addressing Afghanistan tacitly endorses the Obama position. Karzai hasn’t helped him on this with his statement (however self-serving) that diplomatically validates Obama’s creds. His position on foreign policy may become even more tenuous if W in fact is prepared to initiate low-level face-to-face meetings with Iran, because Lieberman and the neocons will be livid over the perceived capitulation and will be pushing for a more aggressive platform plank.

Obama is no pacifist, though McCain is trying to paint him as one. Obama’s view (straight out of Clausewitz) is that force is an extension of international politics by other means, but inherent in that logic is the premise that it must never be used as an end in itself, but used in tandem with diplomacy as a tool towards a greater geopolitical goal. We’ve had more than enough unfocused violence over the years since 2001 - it’s time to coordinate it with rational diplomatic maneuvers.