The Iraq Primary

For all the media hoopla about the Ted Kennedy endorsement, the Al Gore endorsement, the Hillary Clinton endorsement, I wonder whether Barack Obama has just received the most important endorsement of the campaign.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Nouri al-Maliki. Yes, I know the Iraqi prime minister didn't bless his candidacy and won't be appearing as a surrogate on "Hardball." But by blessing Obama's 16-month pullout plan, Maliki is all but climbing on the senator's bandwagon.

And yes, I know, the PM's office later disputed the translation of the Der Spiegel interview, but not very vigorously -- he wasn't described as being against such a pullout -- and Maliki essentially took the same stance after meeting with Obama yesterday.

Why is this a big deal, since Iraq has no electoral votes? Because John McCain has been hammering Obama as a foreign policy naif who would undermine the war on terror with a precipitous pullout, after being flat wrong about the surge. Now the leader of the very government McCain wants to help is saying, you know, I like the idea of most of your troops hitting the road by 2010. And even the Bush administration is papering over the disagreement with talk about "time horizons" (but not timetables, got it?) and "aspirational goals."

So how exactly do the Republicans make the case that Obama is an unrealistic dreamer if the Iraqi leader is on the same page? Now we're all debating the shape and pace of a withdrawal, not an indefinite commitment. Now we're all debating whether to shift troops to Afghanistan, a proposal that Obama made well before McCain.

"Senator Barack Obama arrived in Baghdad on Monday, meeting with Prime Minister [Maliki] and other senior Iraqi politicians, as an Iraqi spokesman said that the government was hopeful that foreign combat troops would withdraw in 2010," says the New York Times. But the report is that the two men didn't discuss the pullout plan.

Chicago Tribune: "Sen. Barack Obama received a fresh boost Monday to his troop withdrawal plan from the Iraqi government, which directly affirmed for the first time that it shares Obama's goal of pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of 2010."

Is McCain getting with the program? "Republican Sen. John McCain on Monday drew closer to his Democratic presidential opponent's timetable on Iraq, saying that U.S. troops could be 'largely withdrawn' in two years," says the Washington Times.

Time's Joe Klein says that while all politics is local, Iraqi local politics affects us:

"The Iraqis have been sending signals for months. They didn't want long term U.S. bases. They didn't want U.S. troops acting independently any more. They wanted some sort of drawdown . . .

"In Iraq, it means that Maliki now feels confident that he is in charge of the government -- and that the government's internal opposition, the Sunni insurgent remnants and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr don't have the strength to threaten him (or his Kurdish and Hakim family allies). It may also mean that he feels he has the strength to handle, by inclusion or exclusion, the Sunni Awakening forces that were raised and funded by the U.S. military . . .

"In short, what Maliki is saying is: Please leave, as soon as possible. He may be saying this for local, political reasons, in the runup to the regional Iraqi elections, but he's saying it."