John McCain, slapdick

While McCain continues to accuse Obama of sacrificing an ephemeral victory and American honor by seeking a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq, the Bush administration are inching ever-closer to an agreement with Iraq — which includes a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq:

American and Iraqi officials are close to a draft agreement to see U.S. forces conditionally withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011, though both sides warned Thursday that political hurdles to a final settlement remain.

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A senior member of Maliki’s ruling coalition, Shiite lawmaker Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, said the sides had still not agreed on all the issues.

“I believe they are struggling,” he said. “It is thorny, but there is a little progress.”

U.S. and Iraqi officials had aimed to reach a deal by the end of July.

Saghir said that the Americans wanted their forces to stay one year more than the Iraqis wanted. Maliki has publicly favored a withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2010, a timeline for withdrawal that roughly corresponds with that proposed by Sen. Barack Obama.

So the administration’s fight now is not against a timetable per se, but against a timetable which corresponds too closely with Obama’s proposed timetable. And an insistence on not calling the timetable a timetable, but rather a “time horizon” or “goal,” so the GOP can try to convince the American people it is something other than a timeline for withdrawal.

The United States has agreed to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by next June and from the rest of the country by the end of 2011 if conditions in Iraq remain relatively stable, according to Iraqi and American officials involved in negotiating a security accord governing American forces there.

The withdrawal timetables, which Bush administration officials called “aspirational goals” rather than fixed dates, are contained in the draft of an agreement that still must be approved by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders before it goes before Iraq’s fractious Parliament. It has the support of the Bush administration, American and Iraqi officials said.

In other words, political and semantical bullshit and the ability to spin rather than substance remains at the top of the GOP agenda. The withdrawal from Iraqi cities, as proposed, corresponds even more directly with Obama’s proposed schedule for withdrawal.

Even so, the accord indicates that the Bush administration is prepared to commit the United States to ending most combat operations in Iraq in less than a year, a much shorter time frame than seemed possible, politically or militarily, even a few months ago.

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Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has argued that the United States should withdraw its troops from Iraq 16 months after taking office, or by mid-2010, a faster pace for full withdrawal than envisioned in the draft accord. But the draft’s interim goal of ending combat operations in Iraqi cities by next summer is faster than any commitment made by Mr. Obama.

Meanwhile, America remains as popular as ever in the new Iraq:

In the Shiite shrine city of Najaf, several hundred demonstrators shouted, “No, no to the agreement. . . . Down with Zionism,” and carried a banner that read, “We denounce the visit of mistress of evil Condoleezza Rice to Iraq.”

So, after we leave Iraq, as it now appears inevitable despite McCain priapismic declarations about staying in Iraq for 100 years or more, what exactly will we have accomplished?

Even now, Iraq’s Shiite government is beginning to unravel many of the deals the US military made with Sunni tribal leaders in order to co-opt them from insurgency to security militias, an implicit rejection of US policy which calls for the Shiite majority to continue reconciliation with its Sunni countrymen:

The Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is starting to arrest many leaders of Sunni citizen patrols, the groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.

In restive Diyala Province, United States and Iraqi military officials say there were orders to arrest hundreds of members of what is known as the Awakening movement as part of large security operations by the Iraqi military. At least five senior members have been arrested there in recent weeks, leaders of the groups say.

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“The state cannot accept the Awakening,” said Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Their days are numbered.”

So we will be rid of Saddam Hussein, but at a huge cost in political, monetary and human capital. And in his place we will have a Shiite dominated regime which leans towards Iran, and either continues to suppress its minority populations, unless it unexpectedly changes course to accept a weaker confederation granting autonomy to Kurdish and Sunni regions, neither of which is a recipe for inherently stable government.