McCain Post Surge

If there is any fixed position in John McCain's policy agenda, it's that there must never, ever, be a timetable for leaving Iraq. He regularly attacks Barack Obama for proposing to withdraw by the summer of 2010. So it was a surprise to hear him say two weeks ago when asked if US troops might depart in the next two years, "Oh, I think they could be largely withdrawn, as I've said."

Last week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he's amenable to bidding the U.S. goodbye on Obama's schedule. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown indicated his forces also will be leaving soon.

Even Bush has come around to establishing a "time horizon" for "the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq." In other words: "We're going to leave, but it's none of your business when."

Despite creeping toward withdrawal himself, McCain continues to slam Obama for setting a timetable. But if the current policy is the stunning success depicted by McCain, it should be eminently practical to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis by the middle of 2010. If it is impossible to do that, more than seven years after the occupation began, how can McCain say the existing strategy is working?

McCain sounded frustrated last week, insisting that Obama was "completely wrong" in opposing the Bush administration's escalation of the war in January 2007. "The fact is, if we had done what Sen. Obama wanted to do, we would have lost," he declared. "And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region."

What McCain omits is that if he himself had been right all the times before 2007 that he said things were going fine, no surge would have been needed. He's like a weatherman who forecasts clear skies every day and, when the rain finally lets up after a week, expects a standing ovation for his accuracy.

Even the progress made in the last 18 months is only partly attributable to the additional American forces. Equally important was the decision of Sunni militias to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq. McCain insists this shift was only made possible by the surge—when, in fact, it happened several months before. Also contributing to the decline in sectarian violence was that by 2007, it already had achieved its main goal: driving Sunnis out of Shiite neighborhoods and vice versa. Of the 5 million Iraqis who fled their homes in the last five years, only 30,000 have returned.

The refugee crisis is just one of the results of a war that McCain has supported all along. The surge didn't provide a remedy to that or the many other afflictions that plague Iraq.