Op-Ed Columns

The military and political winds are slewing around so wildly these days in Iraq that both Barack Obama and John McCain have been sent chasing after their own hats.

Obama built his primary election success in major part by emphasizing his commitment to a phased U.S. withdrawal over 16 months, a stance pitched to the broad disillusionment and impatience that dominate homefront attitudes.

The continuing and apparently accelerating decline in violence in Iraq — with exceptions duly noted — has pressed Obama back to a caveat that was part of his position from the start but little mentioned by the candidate when he was working his party's base.

Obama's Iraq policy has all along been more subtle than press coverage has usually noted. The heat-of-the-moment media have scant interest in, or regard for, nuance, so his vague, long-standing promise of deference to changing circumstances in Iraq has pretty much gone unremarked.

With the candidate now acknowledging that the surge appears to be making a difference for the better which, if it continues, he would take into account as president — the necessary position of any would-be commander in chief — Obama is getting slimed as a sell-out by his own party's Iraq-centric left and mocked by Republicans as a flip-flopper.

(A risky charge, considering McCain himself has bounced back and forth over many issues more often than a retired ping-pong ball. But that's another story.)

Awkward as all that may be at the moment for Obama, pity more John McCain.

McCain ran in the primaries, and is running as nominee presumptive, as the gritty, stay-the-course guy who will settle in Iraq only for "victory" — conveniently left undefined — and afterwards only for a major, open-ended deployment there for, who knows, maybe a century, he has said.

But look who's calling for a short withdrawal deadline now and making clear that it wants none of that projected role as a U.S. garrison state, at least not as a major one. Only the Iraq government, that's who.

As they say in the political trade, oops.

McCain could have used the moment to scuff usefully his own lines in the sand but, too typically of him, the candidate only dug in. He dismissed the statement by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as just so much local politicking — as indeed it was, but then isn't McCain's candidacy, too?

In fact, the push within Iraq for being done with U.S. troops and political supervision has been growing, and growing louder, for months. Was McCain not listening?

And even as McCain was pooh-poohing Maliki's utterance as likely piffle and probably only of the moment, Iraq's national security advisor was repeating that his country would sign no security agreement with Washington unless a deadline was included.

If Obama's potential accommodation to a quieting Iraq has made him seem hypocritical to some in his own party — even a turncoat to the shrillest — the apparent shift will come across as welcome flexibility to many others.

McCain's refusal to consider, even to respect, the Maliki government's declaration makes him seem more stubborn than stalwart. It is hard to see the upside in that.

Tom Teepen is an Atlanta-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.