We posted here the other day about Maliki’s reported insistence on a firm, unconditional timetable for withdrawal, and the Bush administration’s insistence that any provision for withdrawing troops in its eventual agreement with Iraq would be based on “conditions on the ground” as assessed by the US.

McClatchy’s Leila Fadel, however, reported further on Maliki’s remarks, quoting a statement by Maliki that a firm, unconditional date for withdrawal had already been agreed to:

Maliki said that the United States and Iraq had agreed that all foreign troops would be off Iraqi soil by the end of 2011. “There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil,” Maliki said.

Someone here isn’t telling the truth: either the Bush administration, or the Prime Minister of Iraq in whom we’ve invested 35,000 casualties and $3 trillion to bring to power.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has demanded a firm timetable for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq — without conditions:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said Monday that an agreement on the future of U.S. forces in Iraq must include a firm withdrawal date and that Iraq wants them out of the country by the end of 2011.

It was the first time Maliki explicitly demanded a fixed deadline for the departure of all U.S. troops from Iraq. His words appeared to rule out the presence of any U.S. military advisors, special forces and air support after the withdrawal date.

Condi Rice was supposed to smooth this over and get Maliki to agree to the condition-based withdrawal and a permanent US presence, but her record for failure continues unblemished.

The hardened position came after last week’s visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Iraq, where she met with Maliki in hopes of clearing obstacles to an agreement. But officials familiar with the talks say that the prime minister remains undecided about whether he even wants a deal.

Heckuva job, Condi.

Maliki is demanding full US withdrawal on a schedule because, politically, he has little choice. He made the remarks to a meeting of Shiite tribal leaders. His rival, Muqtada al Sadr, has risen to power largely through confrontation with the US and because his demands for an end to US occupation has been popular with Iraqis. Moreover, Maliki may be forced to demand unconditional withdrawal because Iranian-born Shiite Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq’s religious leader, and Iranian leaders find any continued US presence unacceptable.

He is under pressure from Iran, as well as the grand ayatollahs in Iraq’s Shiite shrine city of Najaf, who could come out against an agreement if they feel it infringes on Iraq’s sovereignty. At a time when he needs political cover, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest Shiite party in his alliance, is also deeply divided on ties with the Americans.

The senior leadership of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) was harbored by Iran for years while exiled during Saddam’s rule of Iraq. Its militias, the Badr Brigades, were trained and armed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and fought with Iran against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. With Sadr’s Mahdi Army dramatically curtailing its operations, it is now the most powerful paramilitary presence in Iraq, and staunchly pro-Iranian.

The Bush administration’s reaction to this new permutation of the Iraq clusterfuck is classic Bush administration: denial.

In Crawford, Texas, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: “Any decisions on troops will be based on the conditions on the ground in Iraq. That has always been our position. It continues to be our position.

“There is no agreement until there’s an agreement signed,” he added. “There are discussions that continue in Baghdad.”

Last year, Bush stated unequivocally that we would honor a request by Maliki’s government to leave Iraq:

We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.

~~~

This is a sovereign nation, Martha. We are there at their request. And hopefully the Iraqi government would be wise enough to recognize that without coalition troops, the U.S. troops, that they would endanger their very existence. And it’s why we work very closely with them, to make sure that the realities are such that they wouldn’t make that request — but if they were to make the request, we wouldn’t be there.

Now he’s threatening to hold his breath if he doesn’t get his way, apparently.

Maliki’s government is also intent on disassembling the network of Sunni militia groups which the US put together and which is credited with much of the improvement in security in Anbar and other Sunni inhabited provinces — without the integration of those militias into Iraqi security forces and political reconciliation promised to Sunni tribal leaders by US generals. This will almost certainly spark renewed insurgency among Sunni groups currently armed and paid by the United States — if this fighting occurs next year, Maliki will likely even request US assistance in dispatching his Sunni enemies.

So, after five and a half years, at least $3,000,000,000,000.00, over 35,000 US casualties, and a depleted military force structure, we are left with an Iraq which is more concerned with pleasing neighboring axis-of-evil Iran than with making an increasingly lame George Bush or the United States happy. Ahmed Chalabi and his Iranian handlers couldn’t have planned this any better.

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

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.

~~~

“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.

No matter how many glass houses they own, or even if they can’t remember how many they own.

But McCain continues to toss rocks over Iraq:

“Let me be very clear: I am not questioning his patriotism; I am questioning his judgment,” McCain said. “Sen. Obama has made it clear that he values withdrawal from Iraq above victory in Iraq, even today with victory in sight. Over and over again, he has advocated unconditional withdrawal – regardless of the facts on the ground. And he voted against funding for troops in combat, after he said it would be wrong to do so. He has made these decisions not because he doesn’t love America, but because he doesn’t think it matters whether America wins or loses.”

McCain on the other hand, seems to value the presidency more than honesty, honor or integrity, with his insistence on trying to sell the American people on “winning” a war in Iraq which is already a strategic debacle, and willing to sacrifice more lives and more American dollars to perpetuate our presence and the myth of a “victory” emerging from the ashes of neocon interventionism, just to boost a campaign which is inextricably tied to Iraq.

Even as McCain disingenuously accuses Obama of valuing “withdrawal over victory,” the Bush administration he has so ardently supported on Iraq is agreeing to a withdrawal timeline, albeit covered with semantical fig leafs like “aspirational goals” or “time horizons.” Condi Rice conflated the two and actual called a timetable a timetable in describing the US-Iraqi agreement calling for the withdrawal of US troops.

“We have agreed that some goals, some aspirational timetables for how that might unfold, are well worth having in such an agreement,” Rice told reporters after meeting with Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The two sides had come together on a draft agreement earlier this week and Rice made an unannounced visit to Baghdad to press officials there to complete the accord.

Mc-Bush keep pointing to “conditions on the ground” and repeatedly lie about Obama’s willingness to ostensibly withdraw troops no matter what conditions on the ground exist and regardless of whether such a withdrawal would endanger US troops — a position Obama has never taken.

And McCain is even more willing to distort what may be temporary improvements in Iraqi security obtained by paying Sunni gunmen formerly employed as insurgents as real strategic progress rather than a simple expedient way to delay future warfare which will occur absent reconciliation and concessions by the Shiite central government with close ties to Iran and an unwillingness to integrate Sunni militias into its armed and security forces.

A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who’d joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country’s security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they’d get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don’t intend to include most of the rest.

“We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently,” said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue. “Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida.”

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn’t been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they’d be arrested, he said.

Some militia members say that such a move would force them into open warfare with the government again.

Of course, if that occurs and Iraq goes south again after November, that timeline will work for McCain — because it won’t impact American perceptions of Iraq until after his campaign for the presidency is over, a campaign based on the premise that “his” plan for Iraq has produced real and lasting progress rather than a temporary ceasefire between Sunni and Shiite factions still at odds with one another.

I wonder if all the Rightwingers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, which was the culmination of 40 years of policies of containment originated by Truman and Marshall, and a decade of detente initiated by Nixon and continued by Carter, are going to be so quick, in light of the former Soviet Union’s reemergence as a aggressivie, hegemonic militaristic power, to blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership for losing the post-Cold War? After all, by fracturing the Western Alliance, and squandering US military and diplomatic capital on Iraq, while reifying the legitimacy of using unilateral military force against non-threat nations for the furtherance of national interest, he has certainly made Putin’s decision to attack the Georgian Republic a far easier one. With America’s political capital in the world depleted, and it’s military stretched to continue a 5+ year war in Iraq, Bush has eliminated potential obstacles to Putin’s policies.

Not if Neocon-warmonger and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol is any indication. Kristol, whose predilection for fatuous prediction was epitomized by his assurances that warnings of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was mere “pop sociology” not only fails to mention the contribution of Bush’s successive failures in Iraq as placing the US at any disadvantage vis-a-vis the Russian invasion, he vapidly claims that Iraq has strengthened America’s ability to project power and succor democracy:

The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle.

Of course he neglects to mention that there were no jihadists in Iraq prior to our invasion, save those hiding in the North outside the control of Saddam’s regime, or those hiding from Saddam’s brutal but sectarian Baathist secret police — not when he can claim another Mission Accomplished moment.

Rather than assign any blame to Bush’s witless and counterproductive policies — which of course he and his PNAC cronies urged upon the administration — Kristol is quick to assign blame to the next country he wants President McBushII to invade — Iran:

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

Kristol mendaciously ignores the other elephant in the Cooper article — the role which Iraq has played in dissipating US influence and resources:

Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.

“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”

Of course the “We” here who placed the US in a position where “we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything” is George Bush and feckless neocons like Bill Kristol, who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraq war would pay for itself, and that centuries-old sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions which still threaten to tear Iraq asunder were mere pop sociology.

So it’s this for Reagan, and that for Bush. Reagan won the Cold War, but then Iran lost it.

MORE: Kristol, of course, trotted out the standard Munich analogy, or rather mis-analogy, and fellow PNAC-traveller Robert Kagan does the same in the WaPo, only with a bizarre twist — he can’t recall the details of Nazi Germany’s pretextual accusations against Czechoslovakia which precipitated the Sudetenland crisis, ostensibly because Nazi Germany’s contrived dispute with the Czechs was “morally ambiguous.”

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

I recall the details of the Sudeten Crisis — and they weren’t morally ambiguous in the slightest. Nazi agents organized a minority of ethnic Germans with the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into bands of thugs who simultaneously terrorized politically opponents and Slavic neighbors, while lodging false reports of political oppression and physical brutality by Czech police and groups against Czech citizens of German descent, which were sensationalized and amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine in papers like Der Sturmer. The ostensible leader of the Czech Sudeten Germans, Konrad Heinlein, was taking orders directly from the Nazis with an eye towards the Nazis’ ultimate goal of stripping Czechoslovakia of its formidable border fortresses in the mountains, and thus facilitating its ultimate dismemberment and absorption into the Reich. As Rob points out, the situation with respect to South Ossetia actually is beset with considerable ambiguity.

The fact that Kagan views Hitler’s contrived accusations against the Czechs and the dispute largely manufactured by Nazi agent provocateurs which precipitated Munich as “morally ambiguous” could have enormous explanative potential, given the moral vacuousness of neoconservative policies.

Shorter Verbatim Bill Kristol:

Life may be full of disappointments. But it’s also full of surprises.

Kristol engages is a classic logical fallacy: False Dilemma.

A false dilemma occurs when a limited number of options (usually two) is given, while in reality there are more options.

Here, Kristol implicitly postulates between the options of disappointment or surprises. With characteristic obtuseness, our neocon twit fails to account for a third obvious possiblity — an outcome that is both a surprise and a disappointment.

Like, say, finding out that the notion that Shia may have difficulty coexisting Sunnis in Iraq and violent sectarian struggle could break out in that country is not merely “pop sociology.” Presumably, even to an immoral asshole like Kristol that would be both a disappointment and a surprise — even if the disappointment, from Kristol’s standpoint, stems more from the fact he was made to look like a fucking imbecile than the tens of thousands of lives wiped out by his and his fellow neoconservatives’ miscalculation.

Especially poignant because deconstructing Kristol, he’s referring to an Obama victory as the “disappointment” and a McCain win as a “surprise.”

Is he senile, insane, or has he lost the ability to comprehend simple English? Or maybe he’s gotten used to the media overlooking any batshit crazy thing he happens to say, and he’s just careless.

McCainWorld (via Think Progress): “We were greeted as liberators”

Reality: Over 4,000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, many maimed for life. Between 400-1600 attacks against US and coalition forces every week, for the past 240 weeks — but we’re talking about attacks against US and coalition troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands. And McCain calls this. . .

. . . being “greeted as liberators.

McCain seems to inhabit a fantasy world where words mean only what he says they mean, and where reality too is supposed to bend to whatever he happens to say at the time.

From Ben Smith. While the Bush Administration hurriedly pushed out a statement through Centcom claiming that Maliki’s endorsement of Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal which appeared in Der Spiegel was the result of a “mistranslation,” there’s one wee little problem: Der Spiegel has a policy of issuing transcripts to interviewees, like al Maliki, and allowing them to correct any mistakes prior to publication.

BushCo’s attempt to brush al Maliki’s statement under the rug reminds me of the indignant declaration of the title character in Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy:

Ah, you’ll have to learn to tell a lie properly. What’s the good of a lie if it’s seen through? When I tell a lie, no one can tell it from the gospel truth.

And that’s in English, so no translation needed.

“For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen.”
— George Orwell, 1984

Another Mission Accomplished Moment for the Bush administration, although we have 147,000 troops left in Iraq now, as opposed to the 130,000 troops before teh Surge:

The U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq that President George W. Bush ordered last year has ended after the last of five additional combat brigades left the country, a U.S. military spokesman said on Tuesday.

The remaining troops from that brigade departed over the weekend, leaving just under 147,000 American soldiers in Iraq, the spokesman said.

“The final elements of the surge brigade have now left, getting out a few days ahead of schedule,” he said.

The U.S. military had 20 combat brigades in Iraq at its peak in 2007, with troop levels around 160,000-170,000.

The current number is well above the 130,000 troops in Iraq when Bush ordered the deployment in January 2007. The Pentagon said last February it expected 140,000 troops to be in Iraq once the five brigade drawdown had finished.

So. . . . teh Surge is supposed to improve conditions in Iraq so our troops could come home. . . and was such a smashing success, we end up with 10-17,000 more than when we started.

Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman point out that various ninnies on the Right are attacking Obama for noting that many of the positive developments now attributed to teh Surge by McCain and other Iraq War enthusiasts in fact appear to have occurred not only separately and independently from the Surge, but also months before the Surge strategy was announced and even longer before it was embarked upon. Responding to NRO Obersttwit Andy McCarthy’s comment:

Does Obama think the Sunni Awakening and the Shia militia stand-down are somehow separate developments from the surge and the brilliant performance of American forces? If he really thinks that, it’s dumb.

Drum answers:

* February 2006: Muqtada al-Sadr orders an end to execution-style killings by Mahdi Army death squads.

* August 2006: Sadr announces a broad ceasefire, which he has maintained ever since.

* September 2006: The Sunni Awakening begins. Tribal leaders, first in Anbar and later in other provinces, start fighting back against al-Qaeda insurgents.

* March 2007: The surge begins.

Say what you will about the surge, which does indeed deserve a share of the credit for reducing violence and increasing security in Baghdad. But it pretty obviously wasn’t related to either the Shia militia stand-down or the Sunni Awakening, since both those things began before Petraeus took over in Iraq and before the surge was even a gleam in George Bush’s eye.

Responding to Presumptive Republican Nominee and non-geographer John McCain’s fatuous attack on Obama claiming that:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Ackerman points out that Colonel McFarland himself was explaining the success of the Anbar Awakening to Pam Hess of the UPI in September of 2006, several months before teh Surge was announced by Bush:

I think al Qaeda has been pushed up against the ropes by this, and now they’re finding themselves trapped between the coalition and ISF on the one side, and the people on the other.

Leading Ackerman to conclude:

For McCain to say that the Anbar Awakening is the product of the surge is either a lie or professional malpractice for a presidential candidate who is staking his election on his allegedly superior Iraq judgment.

I’m voting for the fuck up rather than the lie, personally.

Unless it can be demonstrated that teh Surge is so magic it can go back in time and cause the Anbar Sheiks to shift their allegiances, coerce Sadr to reign his militias, and then declare a ceasefire.

In which case I want teh Surge to go back in time again and put $100,000 on the Giants to win the Super Bowl, before the season started.