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 Sean at MNPublius does the endzone happy dance over Iraqi leader Maliki’s “endorsement” of The Messiah’s “withdrawal plan”:
Obviously — this is huge. The Democratically elected leader of Iraq says that Barack Obama’s withdrawal plan (1 or 2 brigades a month, somewhere between 6-8 thousand people a month) is the right idea.
Er, let’s shoot for accuracy here; Maliki agrees with The Messiah’s latest plan. The one he put forward after the surge (which The Messiah opposed) made the whole notion of withdrawal responsible enough for Iraq to consider:
Allahpundit, with emphasis added by me:
The unasked follow-up question: How about the 14-month timetable that Obama wanted to set in January 2007 to start pulling troops out before those positive developments could occur? How keen does that look in hindsight?
(Hindsight? Leftybloggers don’t need no steenkin’ hindsight!)
To repeat a point made yesterday, the only reason a timetable or “time horizon” is arguably a responsible strategy now is because it was properly rejected as being irresponsible then.
Sean missed this part of Maliki’s statement:
Maliki hints at that in another part of the interview:
So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.
Exactly, which at least partly explains why Bush is more willing to compromise now on some sort of informal schedule. Compare Maliki’s justification for the timetable to Obama’s justification in his big Iraq speech. The pacification of the country is almost incidental, something to congratulate Petraeus on and then quickly move past.
Most of us want to embrace the victory that our troops - and tens of thousands of brave Iraqi troops, and the millions of citizens that the troops won over through killing Al-Quaeda and pacifying the religious militias - seem to have won. Obama just wants to gloss it over.
Other than all of that, though? Sure. It’s a ringing endorsement of The Messiah’s sagacity.
Hey - does anyone remember when the left thought Maliki was just a stooge of the Bushes?
Why, sure I do!
UPDATE: Of course, the above only counts if Maliki really said what Sean said he said - if it made the translation from Arabic to German and then to English correctly and… ach du lieber! Und ach, Dolmetschung is so schwehr!
Well, of course, if they got the political context right…D’oh!
Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.
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