The Iraqi government is claiming Der Spiegel mistranslated earlier reports that they were supporting a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops.  The magazine stands by its story.

Ali al-Dabbagh, the chief spokesman for al-Maliki, said in a statement Sunday that the prime minister’s comments were “not conveyed accurately” by Der Spiegel.   Al-Dabbagh said al-Maliki did not endorse a specific timetable but instead discussed “an Iraqi vision” of U.S. troop withdrawals based on negotiations with Washington and “in the light of the continuing positive developments on the ground.” He added that Maliki’s comments has been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” without detailing which parts were affected.

This has prompted AP Baghdad bureau chief Robert Reid to respond with an analysis piece under the headline “Iraq Playing US Politics for Best Deal.”

The Iraqi prime minister’s seeming endorsement of Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal plan is part of Baghdad’s strategy to play U.S. politics for the best deal possible over America’s military mission. The goal is not necessarily to push out the Americans quickly, but instead give Iraqis a major voice in how long U.S. troops stay and what they will do while still there.

It also is designed to refurbish the nationalist credentials of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who owes his political survival to the steadfast support of President Bush. Now, an increasingly confident Iraqi government seems to be undermining long-standing White House policies on Iraq.

[...]

With Obama due to visit Iraq soon, al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh was quick to discredit the report, saying the prime minister’s remarks were “not conveyed accurately.” A top al-Maliki adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, insisted the Iraqi government does not intend to be “part of the electoral campaign in the United States.”But that is precisely what the Iraqis intended to do: exploit Obama’s position on the war to force the Bush administration into accepting concessions considered unthinkable a few months ago.

Well, yeah.  Which is precisely how governments everywhere act.  Indeed, this would appear to be a sign that Maliki and company are more ready for prime time than it had appeared.

Photo:  Reuters

MoveOn has unveiled a new anti-McCain ad titled, simply, “Timeline.”

CNN’s Emily Sherman has a summary. The opener:

In Chicago, in Saint Louis and Seattle, the American people are demanding a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. In Baghdad and Basra and Tikrit, the Iraqi people……and now the Iraqi Prime minister are also demanding a timetable. But John McCain doesn’t want a timetable.

Rather lame, frankly. Like most of McCain’s own spots, it’s a weak ad that tells people what they already know.

At least it’s not the over-the-top nonsense like “General Betray Us” that MoveOn usually goes in for.

Barack Obama takes to the op-ed pages of the NYT to present his new plan for Iraq which is conveniently his old plan for Iraq.   He sees Nuri al-Maliki’s proposal for a a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq as “an enormous opportunity.”

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

Bush and McCain have both said, repeatedly, that we’d accede to the wishes of the Iraqi government.  They merely think a too-rapid withdrawal would be a bad idea and undo the recent gains that even Obama admits were achieved by the Surge which he opposed.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

The problem with a timetable remains the same:  It ignores facts on the ground. In recent months, Iraq has been much more stable and American casualties are now lower than they are in Afghanistan despite many more troops engaged.  It may well be that we can remove most of our forces in two years.   But we simply have no way of knowing that now.  Indeed, Obama admits as much:

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Fair enough. Indeed, all this sounds sensible.  But why, then, continue to hammer the “sixteen months” theme if it’s not set in stone?  Sheer political pandering?

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

He didn’t quite say that.  But, sure, our heavy commitment in Iraq limits our options elsewhere.  Then again, Afghanistan is a NATO mission and Iraq is not.  Why not continue to press our NATO Allies to pick up their fair share of a burden they committed themselves to?  After all, isn’t Obama going to have some magic diplomatic mojo?

The bizarre thing is that, as enticing as declaring victory and going home sounded a few months ago, it appears that things are finally on the right track in Iraq.  While calling Obama’s plan “surrender” is demagogic, it could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

UPDATE (Dodd): Maliki’s statements misreported:

US presidential contender Barack Obama has repeatedly seized on statements attributed to Iraqi leaders to support his call for a troop withdrawal deadline….

The prime minister was widely quoted as saying that in the negotiations with the Americans on a Status of Forces Agreement to regulate the US troop presence from next year, “the direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on a timetable for their withdrawal”. … There is only one problem. It is not what Mr Maliki actually said.

In an audio recording of his remarks, heard by the BBC, the prime minister did not use the word “withdrawal”. What he actually said was: “The direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on programming their presence.”

Mr Maliki’s own office had inserted the word “withdrawal” in the written version, replacing the word “presence”.

The piece goes on to note some disagreement within the Iraqi government on this point, including some very Obama-esque rolling back on some points. Obviously Obama can’t be blamed for relying on Maliki’s own office as to the Prime Minister’s position. But it does tend to underscore the broader point: Making firm plans right now for the withdrawal our troops is an exercise in political pandering, not rational policymaking.

Iraq’s national security advisor announced today that the Iraqi government will be demanding a hard timetable for American troop withdrawl:

Iraq will not accept any security agreement with the United States unless it includes dates for the withdrawal of foreign forces, the government’s national security adviser said on Tuesday.

The comments by Mowaffaq al-Rubaie underscore the U.S.-backed government’s hardening stance toward a deal with Washington that will provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to operate when a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

[...]

Rubaie said Iraq was waiting “impatiently for the day when the last foreign soldier leaves Iraq”.

“We can’t have a memorandum of understanding with foreign forces unless it has dates and clear horizons determining the departure of foreign forces. We’re unambiguously talking about their departure,” Rubaie said in the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf.

Presented without comment.

Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] is all but defeated, Marie Colvin reports for The Sunday Times.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.  Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects. The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

[...]

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.  Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

In a sidebar companion piece, Colvin explains how we got here:

The reversal of fortunes is attributed to the “surge” strategy of General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces, who targeted Al-Qaeda in Iraq above all else after securing an extra 30,000 troops last year. His officers exploited local resentment of the terrorists and promised to protect those who resisted them. Under Petraeus’s plan, they established awakening councils, or groups calling themselves concerned local citizens. These Sunni groups helped to drive Al-Qaeda from many of its bastions.

US and Iraqi forces were then able to retake large swathes of the country and complete the “clearing” of cities such as Ramadi and Falluja and large areas of Baghdad. The overall number of attacks in Iraq has fallen by 80% in the past year alone.

Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has gone on in recent months to reassert control over Basra in the south and Baghdad’s Sadr City, the two main strongholds of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army.

TigerHawk observes, “Notwithstanding the operation against the jihadis in Mosul, we have now gone nine consecutive days without an American KIA (which, if memory serves, is the longest stretch without a single KIA since [May 2003]). The implication is obvious: Iraqis, not Americans, are now at the tip of the spear. That is evidence of a successful counterinsurgency.”

Indeed it is.  It is not, however, sufficient evidence that the counterinsurgency is a success.

Most obviously, AQI and other foreign fighters have always constituted a tiny fraction of the anti-government forces.  Indeed, AQI barely existed when the insurgency started.  They were, however, the most violent and ruthless element.  Further, well-timed terrorist attacks such as the bombings of the Askariya shrine in Samarra escalated a relatively minor insurgency into a major sectarian conflict.

Even if AQI stays on the mat and the tide of replacements coming in from Syria and elsewhere remains stemmed, there’s still the domestic elements with which to contend.  Most significantly, does the Mahdi Army continue its cease fire?  If Muqtada al-Sadr and company decide to make another stand, violence could escalate dramatically.

Turning to US domestic politics, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays.  One could argue that this is good news for John McCain, one of the earliest and staunchest advocates of the Surge.  His argument that the war would have been far more successful if his calls for a larger force had been heeded years ago are buttressed. At the same time, however, Barack Obama can reasonably argue that, if AQI is defeated, the already tenuous relationship between the Iraq War and the global war on terrorism is ended.  These positive developments actually undermine the argument that his calls for rapid withdrawal amount to surrender to the terrorists and acceptance of American defeat.  If AQI is no more, then we’re left with a simple “nation building” operation.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan summarizes the “We’re winning, Vote Obama” position nicely:

[I]f someone had told me a year ago that fifteen of eighteen benchmarks had been reached, that all the parties were in negotiation over future politics, that al Qaeda was close to dead at the hands of the US and the Iraqis, and that oil contracts were being handed out amid four-year lows in violence, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Of course, this all makes Obama’s 16 month withdrawal timetable more and more feasible.

TigerHawk retorts, “If we are, as Andrew says, to judge the judgment of the two candidates, then the answer is clear. Eighteen months ago John McCain argued that the safest way out of Iraq was to win, then withdraw. Barack Obama, parroting the received wisdom of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, said that victory in any meaningful sense was not only unlikely, but that the presence of large numbers of American soldiers actually fed the insurgency and decreased the prospects for stability.”

Jim Hoft believes that this is “a huge blow to Democrats,” especially Obama, “Who was wrong about the surge, wrong about the US military, and wrong about turning Iraq over to its dangerous neighbors, and still flip-flopping like a wet noodle on where he stands.”

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: “If you have to go to The Belmont Club to find out how it’s going, then it’s a success. Failure, the NYT has no trouble covering.”

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Barack Obama is a wise man, indeed.

He’s changed his mind a lot lately. The latest example is NAFTA. After having campaigned in Ohio and elsewhere on the need to renegotiate our trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and excoriating Hillary Clinton for her long-time support for it (all the while Austan Goolsby was telling the Canadians that this was just “policy positioning” and not to take it seriously), the presumptive Democratic nominee issued a major course correction yesterday. He’s told Fortune magazine’s Nina Easton that he may have been a bit hasty.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

Obama says he believes in “opening up a dialogue” with trading partners Canada and Mexico “and figuring to how we can make this work for all people.”

Not surprisingly, those on the Right are hammering Obama for his inconsistency while some on the Left feel betrayed. HuffPo’s David Sirota sniffs, “You Can’t Represent the Uprising While Undermining It.”

Obama is trying to find a “third way” on a binary issue. He’s trying to make everyone happy – and he seems to think you can simultaneously appease Corporate America and American workers on trade rules that inherently force politicians to take one side or the other. You either have trade rules that are aimed at helping ordinary workers, or trade rules that are aimed at padding corporate profits and enriching a transnational elite. The idea that you can have both – or worse, that the NAFTA model does both – is absurd.

But this is Obama’s M.O. – he wants to please everyone. The problem for him is that the public – based on polls – knows that these policies are binary and are screwing them. If he talks out of both sides of his mouth on this issue, he will fail to represent the uprising and take advantage of this populist moment – and he will likely lose the election. That would be a huge tragedy.

NAFTA isn’t the only major policy platform on which his position has conveniently evolved in a more centrist direction in recent weeks.

Obama has started recalibrating some of his stances for the general election, and this new [foreign policy adviser] team could steer him further away from some of the bolder positions he took in the primaries.

[Madeline] Albright publicly praised Clinton’s comments that she would not meet leaders of rogue nations without pre-conditions, after Obama said he would hold such meetings and criticized Clinton’s stance. While not taking on Obama directly, [Lee] Hamilton in a recent interview said “you cannot lock yourself into something in a fluid situation” when asked about setting a precise timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Obama has indicated some flexibility on both issues in recent weeks, saying he would meet with leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only to advance U.S. interests, and he would consider revising his plan to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq in this first two years in office if the situation there suggested a different approach.

In the cases of Ahmadinijad and Iraq, I believe Obama has genuinely evolved. He began this campaign as a neophyte on the national stage and foreign policy has only recently been an object of serious focus for him. It’s quite reasonable to think that he gave an honest, gut answer to the debate question and has since been persuaded by wiser heads that reality is more complicated than theory. In the case of NAFTA, I’m inclined to agree with Doug Mataconis that Obama is guilty of sheer pandering given the contemporaneous comments by Goolsby.

Ed Morrissey quips, “Keeping track of Obama’s positions feels like being a spectator at a table tennis match.”

Jim Hoft asks, “Is anyone really surprised by this?”

They shouldn’t be. Obama’s right: “Politicians are always guilty” of pandering to their audiences. It’s especially true of presidential candidates, who invariably tack to the center after months of appealing to an ideologically rabid base to win the nomination. Bruce McQuain observed, “The more I see and hear of Mr. Obama, the more I realize there’s nothing at all ‘new’, in a political sense, about him.”

Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing?

While politicians should absolutely be called on politically convenient policy maneuvering to both punish them for demagoguery and to ferret out what they really think, it’s far better that they ultimately adopt reasonable positions rather than stubbornly holding to ill-advised pledges. Obama has rightly been criticized for the latter in getting trapped into supporting an “accidental foreign policy” rather than admitting he was too glib in answering a debate question.

There’s a better than even chance this man will be our next president. It is, as Dave Schuler observed on yesterday’s episode of OTB Radio, quite reassuring that he’s amenable to reason.

UPDATE: John Ibbitson makes a related point very nicely for the Globe and Mail.

[I]n any election, voters should be asking themselves: Would this candidate learn from failure, or would he reinforce it? Mr. McCain’s decision to fire his campaign staff and retreat to New Hampshire when all seemed lost suggests that he can adapt his tactics and keep up his spirits in the midst of political adversity.

Mr. Obama tried to place his attachment to Rev. Jeremiah Wright within the context of race and religion in America. But when Mr. Wright renewed his outrages, the candidate repudiated the pastor entirely.

Both examples are encouraging. What each man has on his CV is really not that big a deal. The big deal involves judgment, objectivity and a sort of political humility, which in a politician can be the most important, and most elusive, asset of all.

Quite.

Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, who resigned his post as CENTCOM commander after a controversial Tom Barnett interview was published in Esquire, gave his first interview as a private citizen to CNN’s Kyra Phillips. A brief excerpt from the transcript:

ADM. FALLON: I think the real story here is what’s important. What was important was not me. It wasn’t some discussion about where I was with issues. It was the fact that we have a war in progress. We had a couple hundred thousand people whose lives were at stake in Iraq and Afghanistan and we needed to be focused on that and not a discussion on me and what I might have said or thought or someone perceived I said. That’s the motivation.

PHILLIPS: Let’s talk about this article. It was the catalyst. It was the last straw. Tom Barnett made it appear that you were the only man standing between the president and a war with Iran. Is that true?

ADM. FALLON: I don’t believe for a second president bush wants a war with Iran. The situation with Iran is very complex. People sometimes portray it or try to portray it in very simplistic terms we’re against Iran, we want to go to war with Iran, we want to be close to them, the reality is in international politics that many aspects to many of these situations and I believe in our relationship with Iran we need to be strong and firm and convey the principles on which this country stands and upon which our policies are based. At the same time demonstrate a willingness and openness to engage in dialogue because there are things we can find in common.

PHILLIPS: Would have you negotiated with Iran?

ADM. FALLON: It’s not my position to negotiate with Iran. I was the military commander in the Middle East. I had responsibility for our people and their safety and well-being.

PHILLIPS: So when talk of the third war came out a war with Iran, the president didn’t say to you this is what I want to you do and did you stand up and say bad move?

ADM. FALLON: It’s probably not appropriate to try to characterize it in that way. Again, don’t believe for a second that the president really wants to go to war with Iran. We have a lot of things going on. There are many other ways to solve problems. I was very open and candid in my advice. I’m not shy. I will tell people, the leaders, what I think. Offer my opinions on Iran and other things and continue to do that.

[...]

PHILLIPS: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, talk about pulling troops out by next year. John McCain says, no, we got to stay the course. What is the best course for Iraq right now?

ADM. FALLON: I believe the best course is to retain the high confidence we have in General Petraeus and his team out there. Dave has done a magnificent job in leading our people in that country. Again, this situation is quite complex. Many angles. There’s a very, very important military role here in providing stability and security in this country but that’s not going to be successful as we know without lots of other people playing a hand. The political side of things in Iraq has got to move forward. That appears to be improving. People have to have confidence in their futures. They want to have stability. They would like to be able to raise their families in peace. They would like to have a job. They would like to look to tomorrow as better than today. It takes more than the military but the military is the one that provides stability and security. The idea we would walk away from Iraq strikes me as not appropriate. We all want to bring our troops home. We want to have the majority of our people back and we want the war ended. Given where we are today, the progress that they’ve made particularly in the last couple months, I think it’s very, very heartening to see what’s really happened here. The right course of action is to continue to work with the Iraqis and let them take over the majority of the tasks for ensuring security for the country and have our people come out on a timetable that’s appropriate with conditions on the ground.

The video of the complete segment is here.

As Bruce McQain notes, Fallon “refuses to take the bait” to trash the administration. And this furthers my predisposition on two things: Fallon is too much a professional to undermine his country’s foreign policy in media interviews and that war with Iran is not something the administration is pushing towards, much to the disappointment of many.

General David Petraeus’ testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today was cautious and somewhat predictable.

Key quotes follow with bold emphasis mine in all cases:

Since Ambassador Crocker and I appeared before you seven months ago there has been significant but uneven security progress in Iraq. Since September, levels of violence and civilian deaths have been reduced substantially, Al Qaida-Iraq and a number of other extremist elements have been dealt serious blows, the capabilities of Iraqi security force elements have grown, and there has been noteworthy involvement of local Iraqis in local security.

Nonetheless, the situation in certain areas is still unsatisfactory and innumerable challenges remain. Moreover, as events in the past two weeks have reminded us and as I have repeatedly cautioned, the progress made since last spring is fragile and reversible.

[...]

Another important factor has been the attitudinal shift among certain elements of the Iraqi population. Since the first Sunni Awakening in late 2006, Sunni communities in Iraq increasingly have rejected Al Qaida-Iraq’s indiscriminate violence and extremist ideology. These communities also recognize that they could not share in Iraq’s bounty if they didn’t participate in the political arena. Over time, Awakenings have prompted tens of thousands of Iraqis, some former insurgents, to contribute to local security as so-called Sons of Iraq. With their assistance and with relentless pursuit of Al Qaida- Iraq, the threat posed by AQI, while still lethal and substantial, has been reduced significantly.

[...]

In September, I described the fundamental nature of the conflict in Iraq as a competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources. This completion continues, influenced heavily by outside actors. And its resolution remains the key to producing long- term stability in Iraq.

[...]

Finally, insufficient Iraqi government capacity, lingering sectarian mistrust and corruption add to Iraq’s problems.

[...]

Given the importance of the Sons of Iraq, we’re working closely with the Iraqi government to transition them into the Iraqi security forces or other forms of employment. And over 21,000 have already been accepted into the police or army or other government jobs. [Sons of Iraq = Former Baathist Dead-Enders -ed.]

[...]

Iraqi forces have grown significantly since September, and over 540,000 individuals now serve in the Iraqi security forces. The number of combat battalions capable of taking the lead in operations, albeit with some coalition support, has grown to well over 100. These units are bearing an increasing share of the burden, as evidenced by the fact that Iraqi security losses have recently been three times our own.

[...]

In the coming months, Iraq leaders must strengthen governmental capacity, execute budgets, pass additional legislation, conduct provincial elections, carry out a census, determine the status of disputed territories, and resettle internally displaced persons and refugees. These tasks would challenge any government, much less a still-developing government tested by war.

[...]

It clearly is in our national interests to help Iraq prevent the resurgence of Al Qaida in the heart of the Arab world, to help Iraq resist Iranian encroachment on its sovereignty, to avoid renewed ethno-sectarian violence that could spill over Iraq’s borders and make the existing refugee crisis even worse, and to enable Iraq to expand its role in the regional and global economies.

Andrew Sullivan’s assessment strikes me as about right:

Petraeus and Crocker strike me as making every effort to be intellectually honest, and their credibility is all the greater for it. They certainly appear more circumspect about Iraq than some of their Republican interlocutors (Inhofe, predictably, is a parody of knee-jerkism and Lindsey Graham seems much more insistent on the surge’s success than Petraeus). He’s candid about turning Baghdad into a warren of sectarian mini-ghettoes guarded by massive internal walls, about Iran’s large gains in influence whatever happens, about a recent spike in violence.

I haven’t had a chance to see the testimony or the Q&A yet; I’ll likely comment further once I have.

Early big media coverage:

• “General Resists Timetable for Withdrawal of Troops in Iraq,” Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, NYT

• “Petraeus: Iraq Security Improved, but ‘Fragile and Reversible’,” William Branigin, WaPo

• “Petraeus Says Iraq Too `Fragile’ for Removing Troops,” Nicholas Johnston and Ken Fireman, AP

America’s top military leader is warning about rapid withdrawal from Iraq.

The Joint Chiefs chairman has a word of warning to Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: A rapid of withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a “chaotic situation” and would “turnaround the gains we have achieved, and struggled to achieve, and turn them around overnight.

Admiral Mullen’s comments came in a response to a question about what the Joint Chiefs are doing to prepare for a new president, given that two of the candidates have called for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. “We need to be prepared across the board for what a new president will bring,” Mullen said. “I do worry about a rapid withdrawal. . . [that would] turn around the gains we have achieved and struggled to achieve and turn them around overnight.” Asked to define a “rapid withdrawal,” Mullen said, “a withdrawal that would be so fast that it would leave us in a chaotic situation and the gains we have achieved would be lost.”

That said, Mullen added: “When a new president comes in, I will get my orders and I will carry them out.”

Obviously.

Despite early rhetoric in the campaign, it has become rather clear that none of the three serious candidates for the presidency would order a “rapid withdrawal” under that definition. John McCain is obviously more committed to the mission’s success but neither Clinton nor Obama wants to be blamed for failure.

John Hawkins, Joy McCann and I just wasted half an hour trying to get in to the McCain speech but, even with media credentials, we couldn’t. Something about the fire code.

I don’t feel too bad: Clarence Page was there getting turned away with us, along with several less notable journalists working for mainstream media outlets. So it goes. I’m back up watching via closed circuit television.

George Allen introduced him and now somebody I don’t recognize is on. Turns out to be Senator Tom Coburn, who I admire politically, but he’s new enough on the scene that I don’t know his face; I just don’t watch much news television anymore and print media often doesn’t put a picture with the face.

McCain’s speech was conciliatory, praising Mitt Romney as “a great governor” and Mike Huckabee as a “great man” (or something along those lines). He must have used the word “conservative” 200 times. Nothing of any great substance in the speech for those of us who have been paying attention all these months.

The crowd reception was relatively enthusiastic. If there was a lot of booing, it wasn’t audible on the closed circuit; it might have been in the hall.

The prepared text below the fold, courtesy Patrick Hynes of the campaign. I’m using John Hawkins‘ version, which cleaned up the formatting.

U.S. Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign today released the following remarks by John McCain as prepared for delivery:

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a little while since I’ve had the honor of addressing you, and I appreciate very much your courtesy to me today. We should do this more often. I hope you will pardon my absence last year, and understand that I intended no personal insult to any of you. I was merely pre-occupied with the business of trying to escape the distinction of pre-season frontrunner for the Republican nomination, which, I’m sure some of you observed, I managed to do in fairly short order. But, now, I again have the privilege of that distinction, and this time I would prefer to hold on to it for a while.

I know I have a responsibility, if I am, as I hope to be, the Republican nominee for President, to unite the party and prepare for the great contest in November. And I am acutely aware that I cannot succeed in that endeavor, nor can our party prevail over the challenge we will face from either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, without the support of dedicated conservatives, whose convictions, creativity and energy have been indispensible to the success our party has had over the last quarter century. Many of you have disagreed strongly with some positions I have taken in recent years. I understand that. I might not agree with it, but I respect it for the principled position it is. And it is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative. Further, I hope you will grant that I have defended many positions we share just as ardently as I have made my case for positions that have provoked your opposition. If not, thank you for this opportunity to make my case today.

I am proud to be a conservative, and I make that claim because I share with you that most basic of conservative principles: that liberty is a right conferred by our Creator, not by governments, and that the proper object of justice and the rule of law in our country is not to aggregate power to the state but to protect the liberty and property of its citizens. And like you, I understand, as Edmund Burke observed, that “whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither . . . is safe.”

While I have long worked to help grow a public majority of support for Republican candidates and principles, I have also always believed, like you, in the wisdom of Ronald Reagan, who warned in an address to this conference in 1975, that “a political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers.”

I attended my first CPAC conference as the invited guest of Ronald Reagan, not long after I had returned from overseas, when I heard him deliver his “shining city upon a hill” speech. I was still a naval officer then, but his words inspired and helped form my own political views, just as Ronald Reagan’s defense of America’s cause in Vietnam and his evident concern for American prisoners of war in that conflict inspired and were a great comfort to those of us who, in my friend Jerry Denton’s words, had the honor of serving “our country under difficult circumstances.” I am proud, very proud, to have come to public office as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution. And if a few of my positions have raised your concern that I have forgotten my political heritage, I want to assure you that I have not, and I am as proud of that association today as I was then. My record in public office taken as a whole is the record of a mainstream conservative. I believe today, as I believed twenty-five years ago, in small government; fiscal discipline; low taxes; a strong defense, judges who enforce, and not make, our laws; the social values that are the true source of our strength; and, generally, the steadfast defense of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which I have defended my entire career as God-given to the born and unborn.

Those are my beliefs, and you need not examine only my past votes and speeches to assure yourselves that they are my genuine convictions. You can take added confidence from the positions I have defended during this campaign. I campaigned in Iowa in opposition to agriculture subsidies. I campaigned in New Hampshire against big government mandated health care and for a free market solution to the problem of unavailable and unaffordable health care. I campaigned in Michigan for the tax incentives and trade policies that will create new and better jobs in that economically troubled state. I campaigned in Florida against the national catastrophic insurance fund bill that passed the House of Representatives and defended my opposition to the prescription drug benefit bill that saddled Americans with yet another hugely expensive entitlement program. I have argued to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, to reduce the corporate tax rate and abolish the AMT. I have defended my position on protecting our Second Amendment rights, including my votes against waiting periods, bans on the so-called “assault weapons,” and illegitimate lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers. I have proudly defended my twenty-four year pro-life record. Throughout this campaign, I have defended the President’s brave decision to increase troop levels in Iraq to execute a long overdue counterinsurgency that has spared us the terrible calamity of losing that war. I held these positions because I believed they were in the best interests of my party and country.”

Surely, I have held other positions that have not met with widespread agreement from conservatives. I won’t pretend otherwise nor would you permit me to forget it. On the issue of illegal immigration, a position which provoked the outspoken opposition of many conservatives, I stood my ground aware that my position would imperil my campaign. I respect your opposition for I know that the vast majority of critics to the bill based their opposition in a principled defense of the rule of law. And while I and other Republican supporters of the bill were genuine in our intention to restore control of our borders, we failed, for various and understandable reasons, to convince Americans that we were. I accept that, and have pledged that it would be among my highest priorities to secure our borders first, and only after we achieved widespread consensus that our borders are secure, would we address other aspects of the problem in a way that defends the rule of law and does not encourage another wave of illegal immigration.

All I ask of any American, conservative, moderate, independent, or enlightened Democrat, is to judge my record as a whole, and accept that I am not in the habit of making promises to my country that I do not intend to keep. I hope I have proven that in my life even to my critics. Then vote for or against me based on that record, my qualifications for the office, and the direction where I plainly state I intend to lead our country. If I am so fortunate as to be the Republican nominee for President, I will offer Americans, in what will be a very challenging and spirited contest, a clearly conservative approach to governing. I will make my case to voters, no matter what state they reside in, in the same way. I will not obscure my positions from voters who I fear might not share them. I will stand on my convictions, my conservative convictions, and trust in the good sense of the voters, and in my confidence that conservative principles still appeal to a majority of Americans, Republicans, Independents and Reagan Democrats.

Often elections in this country are fought within the margins of small differences. This one will not be. We are arguing about hugely consequential things. Whomever the Democrats nominate, they would govern this country in a way that will, in my opinion, take this country backward to the days when government felt empowered to take from us our freedom to decide for ourselves the course and quality of our lives; to substitute the muddled judgment of large and expanding federal bureaucracies for the common sense and values of the American people; to the timidity and wishful thinking of a time when we averted our eyes from terrible threats to our security that were so plainly gathering strength abroad. It is shameful and dangerous that Senate Democrats are blocking an extension of surveillance powers that enable our intelligence and law enforcement to defend our country against radical Islamic extremists. This election is going to be about big things, not small things. And I intend to fight as hard as I can to ensure that our principles prevail over theirs.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to increase the size of the federal government.

I intend to reduce it. I will not sign a bill with earmarks in it, any earmarks in it. I will fight for the line item veto, and I will not permit any expansion whatsoever of the entitlement programs that are bankrupting us. On the contrary, I intend to reform those programs so that government is no longer in that habit of making promises to Americans it does not have the means to keep.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will raise your taxes.

I intend to cut them. I will start by making the Bush tax cuts permanent. I will cut corporate tax rates from 35 to 25% to keep industries and jobs in this country. I will end the Alternate Minimum Tax. And I won’t let a Democratic Congress raise your taxes and choke the growth of our economy.

They will offer a big government solution to health care insurance coverage.

I intend to address the problem with free market solutions and with respect for the freedom of individuals to make important choices for themselves.

They will appoint to the federal bench judges who are intent on achieving political changes that the American people cannot be convinced to accept through the election of their representatives.

I intend to nominate judges who have proven themselves worthy of our trust that they take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people’s elected representatives, judges of the character and quality of Justices Roberts and Alito, judges who can be relied upon to respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency, and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue.

I intend to win the war, and trust in the proven judgment of our commanders there and the courage and selflessness of the Americans they have the honor to command. I share the grief over the terrible losses we have suffered in its prosecution. There is no other candidate for this office who appreciates more than I do just how awful war is. But I know that the costs in lives and treasure we would incur should we fail in Iraq will be far greater than the heartbreaking losses we have suffered to date. And I will not allow that to happen.

They won’t recognize and seriously address the threat posed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions to our ally, Israel, and the region.

I intend to make unmistakably clear to Iran we will not permit a government that espouses the destruction of the State of Israel as its fondest wish and pledges undying enmity to the United States to possess the weapons to advance their malevolent ambitions.

Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will concede to our critics that our own actions to defend against its threats are responsible for fomenting the terrible evil of radical Islamic extremism, and their resolve to combat it will be as flawed as their judgment.

I intend to defeat that threat by staying on offense and by marshaling every relevant agency of our government, and our allies, in the urgent necessity of defending the values, virtues and security of free people against those who despise all that is good about us.

These are but a few of the differences that will define this election. They are very significant differences, and I promise you, I intend to contest these issues on conservative grounds and fight as hard as I can to defend the principles and positions we share, and to keep this country safe, proud, prosperous and free.

We have had a few disagreements, and none of us will pretend that we won’t continue to have a few. But even in disagreement, especially in disagreement, I will seek the counsel of my fellow conservatives. If I am convinced my judgment is in error, I will correct it. And if I stand by my position, even after benefit of your counsel, I hope you will not lose sight of the far more numerous occasions when we are in complete accord.

I began by assuring you that we share a conception of liberty that is the bedrock of our beliefs as conservatives. As you know, I was deprived of liberty for a time in my life, and while my love of liberty is no greater than yours, you can be confident that mine is the equal of any American’s. It is a deep and unwavering love. My life experiences in service to our country inform my political judgments. They are at the core of my convictions. I am pro-life and an advocate for the Rights of Man everywhere in the world because of them, because I know that to be denied liberty is an offense to nature and nature’s Creator. I will never waver in that conviction, I promise you. I know in this country our liberty will not be seized in a political revolution or by a totalitarian government. But, rather, as Burke warned, it can be “nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.” I am alert to that risk and will defend against it, and take comfort from the knowledge that I will be encouraged in that defense by my fellow conservatives.

You have heard me say before that for all my reputation as a maverick, I have only found true happiness in serving a cause greater than my self-interest. For me, that cause has always been our country, and the ideals that have made us great. I have been her imperfect servant for many years, and I have made many mistakes. You can attest to that, but need not. For I know them well myself. But I love her deeply and I will never, never tire of the honor of serving her. I cannot do that without your counsel and support. And I am grateful, very grateful, that you have given me this opportunity to ask for it.

Thank you and God bless you.

As we commemorate Martin Luther King’s life today, here is what I think may be the most important passage from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written to the clergy of Birmingham who counseled against the SCLC’s protests in that city in 1963:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. [emphasis mine]

It seems oddly appropriate that this letter to clergymen speaks so directly to the actions of an ordained minister in the past week. Mike Huckabee had a chance to do the right thing in a circumstance where it almost certainly wouldn’t have cost him any votes, like two of his fellow Republican presidential candidates did. Instead, he did the cowardly thing and, echoing the “outside agitators” rhetoric of the opponents of civil rights, said the following:

South Carolina people know true conservatism when they see it. You don’t like people outside the state telling you how you ought to raise your kids, you don’t like people from outside the state telling you what to do with the flag. In fact, if somebody came down to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ’em where to put the pole.

I think at least in this case Dr. King would have found silence less appalling. The good people of South Carolina, however, spoke with their votes on Saturday and have effectively eliminated Huckabee as a viable contender for the presidency. Perhaps the good people of that state will this Saturday speak again in opposition to the charlatan spouse of “America’s first black president,” a man whose tenure in the Oval Office was long on lip service to the black community but short on deeds, and in support of the candidacy of the man who is Dr. King’s dream made manifest, Barack Obama.

Harry Reid is threatening to cut off funds if President Bush doesn’t start bringing the troops home from Iraq. And this time he means it!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that Democrats won’t approve more money for the Iraq war this year unless President Bush agrees to begin bringing troops home.

By the end of the week, the House and Senate planned to vote on a $50 billion measure for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would require Bush to initiate troop withdrawals immediately with the goal of ending combat by December 2008.

If Bush vetoes the bill, “then the president won’t get his $50 billion,” Reid, D-Nev., told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made a similar statement last week in a closed-door caucus meeting.

The tough rhetoric does not necessarily foretell another veto showdown with Bush on the war. Similar legislation has routinely fallen short of the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. It is possible the upcoming bill will sink, in which case Democrats would probably wait until next year to revisit the issue.

But their remarks reflect an emerging Democratic strategy on the war: Force congressional Republicans and Bush to accept a timetable for troop withdrawals, or turn Pentagon accounting processes into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Raise your hands if you think Reid and Pelosi will actually follow through on this.

The bottom line is that none of the top-tier presidential candidates in either party are running on a platform of rapid, immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Absent some sort of miracle peace settlement, we’ll be engaging in combat in Iraq well into 2009.

Whatever the politics of these stunts vis-a-vis Iraq, they’re simply asinine in the case of Afghanistan. Virtually everyone agrees that the mission there is vital. Unlike Iraq, support for going in was overwhelming on a bipartisan basis. Unlike Iraq, it’s a multilateral mission under NATO auspices, with the brunt of the casualties being taken by our allies. Reid seriously wants to undercut that to make political hay?

North Korea has agreed to disable its main nuclear reactor and allow intrusive verification measures.

North Korea will provide a complete list of its nuclear programs and disable its facilities at its main reactor complex by Dec. 31, actions that will be overseen by a U.S.-led team, the six nations involved in disarmament talks said Wednesday. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei said that as part of the agreement, Washington will lead an expert group to Pyongyang “within the next two weeks to prepare for disablement” and will fund those initial activities. “The disablement of the five megawatt experimental reactor at Yongbyon, the reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and the nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility at Yongbyon will be completed by 31 December 2007,” said Wu, who read the statement from the six nations to reporters, but did not take any questions.

The Bush administration welcomed the agreement, calling it significant progress. “These second-phase actions effectively end the DPRK’s production of plutonium — a major step towards the goal of achieving the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council. The complex at Yongbyon has been at the center of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs for decades and is believed to have produced the nuclear device Pyongyang detonated a year ago to prove its long-suspected nuclear capability.

[...]

The statement also said the U.S. and North Korea will “increase bilateral exchanges and enhance mutual trust” but did not set a specific timetable for when Washington will remove Pyongyang from a list of countries that sponsor terrorism — a key North Korean demand. Arrangements will be made in future meetings between the two on normalizing their relations, the statement said. In addition, the statement reiterated the five other countries’ commitment to deliver the fuel oil and other energy and economic assistance as spelled out in the February deal.

We’ve been down this road before, of course, having seemingly reached a similar point in 1994. The six party nature of this deal, though, should make it much easier to enforce, since all of the DPRK’s neighbors are part of the solution. Then again, it also complicates matters:

Shortly after Wednesday’s deal was announced, however, Japan said it would not provide aid to North Korea or lift its economic sanctions against the country because of a dispute over North Korea’s past abductions of Japanese citizens. “There will be no immediate action from Japan. We will wait to see what North Korea does next,” Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said. “Japan’s policy remains unchanged. We will consider aid once we see progress on the abductions issue.” Tokyo wants Pyongyang to account for its abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s — a main sticking point for the two countries, which have no diplomatic ties.

One would think a denuclearized North Korea would be in Japan’s best interests regardless of whether such accounting takes place. Still, their desire to resolve that issue is understandable.

The American public’s views on Iraq policy are within the margin of error of where they were before the highly publicized testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress, two recent surveys show.

A Gallup/USA Today poll compares views right after the testimony to right before:

In the days before Petraeus’ appearances and President Bush’s speech to the nation last week, 60% supported setting a timetable for withdrawal and sticking to it “regardless of what is going on in Iraq at the time.” Now 59% do.

[...]

The number of Americans who say it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq ticked up to 58% from 54% in the USA TODAY Poll a week earlier.

Similarly, a new Pew survey shows a longer-term stability:

In the current survey, a 47% plurality says the United States will probably or definitely fail to achieve its goals in Iraq, which is largely unchanged from July (49%). Most important, opinions about whether to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq have not changed at all over the past two months: 54% believe U.S. forces should be brought home as soon as possible while 39% say U.S. troops should remain in Iraq until the situation is stable.

There has been, however, some shift in attitudes on smaller points:

Currently, 41% say the U.S. military effort is going very or fairly well, up from 36% in July. In addition, 31% say that President Bush’s troop increase is making things better in Iraq, which is somewhat higher than in April (24%); however, as was the case in April, nearly half (46%) say the troop increase is having no effect. As is the case with several measures of opinion about Iraq, most of the increases in positive views regarding the surge have come among Republicans.

[...]

Notably, the number saying the U.S. is making progress in reducing the number of civilian casualties rose from 21% in July to 37% today – the highest percentage measured since the question was first asked in December 2005. Nearly half of Americans (48%) still believe the United States is losing ground in reducing civilian casualties, though that represents a sharp decline since July (65%).

Over time, though, the trends are clearly away from support for the war and toward some sort of phased withdrawal.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein points out that the trends have been pretty consistent on this issue since the summer of 2003. That’s an interesting point and one that’s borne out by the Gallup numbers.

What’s especially interesting is that the numbers on both key questions — “All in all, do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq, or not?” and “In view of the developments since we first sent our troops to Iraq, do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, or not?” — had majorities pointing in the wrong direction in November 2004, when President Bush was re-elected.

In an Analysis piece fronting today’s WaPo, Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks argue that yesterday’s testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker may well have succeeded in buying more time for the mission in Iraq.

Petraeus and Crocker have long complained that the Washington clock — with congressional demands that the time has come for Iraqis to take over their security and reconcile their political differences — is running far faster than the one in Baghdad. Yesterday, they tried to slow Washington down.

[...]

Judging by the relatively mild congressional reaction in a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, Petraeus and Crocker may well succeed this week in deflecting Democratic demands to bring the troops home sooner rather than later. They are likely to face tougher questioning — and stiffer challenges to the emerging trends they described — from two Senate committees today. But by the time President Bush speaks to the nation later this week, September’s much-anticipated battle over Iraq policy may be all but over.

That’s an amazing conclusion from the author of FIASCO and in view of the massive tide of information pointing in the other direction.

CFR’s Robert McMahon puts it in perspective:

Ahead of their testimony, a series of other expert reports seemed to lend evidence to opponents of the surge. A new National Intelligence Estimate cites increasing divisions among Shiite factions and mounting criticism of the Shiite-led government by Sunni and Kurdish parties. The Government Accountability Office finds that the Iraqi government has met three of eighteen political and military benchmarks, and has partially met four others. A third report, from a commission of retired senior military and law enforcement officers, recommends disbanding Iraq’s national police force, largely because of sectarian divisions. Further, an opinion survey released Monday by the BBC, ABC News, and the Japanese broadcaster NHK found about 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has worsened in the sections covered by the surge in the past six months.

CFR Senior Fellows Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon says the Petraeus and Crocker reports are “irrelevant” because “the future of Iraq hinges on the outcome of its raging civil war, not on any recalibration of U.S. military strategy.” But the Iraqi prime minister said Monday that U.S.-led forces had given a boost to the country, and that Iraqi forces are not ready (VOA) to take over security responsibility.

Further, as I pointed out yesterday, there wasn’t much new in yesterday’s testimony. Those of us who follow this on a daily basis were likely underwhelmed.

George Will has a column out today entitled (at RealClear Politics, at least) “By Bush’s Own Standard, Surge Has Failed.” [Update: WaPo headlined it, "A War Still Seeking a Mission."]

Before Gen. David Petraeus’ report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq’s Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was the fact that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president’s and Petraeus’ standards of success.

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America’s hands.

DeYoung and Ricks suggest that the testimony many have helped move the goalposts

Crocker, whose voice seemed at times tinged with sadness, said the only valid way to judge Iraq now is to understand what Saddam Hussein did to the country. He then jumped ahead, describing 2006 as “a bad year” in which Iraq nearly unraveled. Ignoring the years after the invasion and before the troop increase in which the United States unsuccessfully tried to fashion a representative government, Crocker said that “the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007 had its seeds in Saddam’s social deconstruction, and it had dire consequences for the people of Iraq as well as its politics.”

The country, he said, “is experiencing a revolution — not just regime change. It is only by understanding this that we can appreciate what is happening in Iraq and what Iraqis have achieved, as well as maintain a sense of realism about the challenges that remain.” Realism, Crocker suggested, means suspending demands that Iraq reach 18 political and security benchmarks that Congress has set for it — few of which the Iraqis have achieved — and accepting instead more modest forms of progress. “Some of the more promising political developments at the national level,” Crocker said, “are neither measured in benchmarks nor visible to those far from Baghdad.”

The legislation that imposed the benchmarks remains in place, and Bush still owes Congress a report at the end of this week on whether they have been met. But Petraeus and Crocker succeeded to a large extent yesterday in making them irrelevant.

We’ll see, I suppose. Given that wars are fought for political objectives, having milestones to measure their success seems reasonable enough. Clearly, we haven’t achieved many of those objectives to this point and the biggest ones seem out of reach.

Then again, this isn’t the war we wanted. The insurgency was a response to our invasion, not its cause. Successful counterinsurgencies generally take years, if not decades. And they don’t respond well to timelines and checklists. Still, if the goalposts have moved, the president hasn’t mentioned it up to now.