For all the advance consternation about the political risks that Barack Obama faced in going to Afghanistan and Iraq, his Middle East visit was a no-brainer from the start.
Beyond his exotic personal background and rock-star appeal, the fact that American prestige abroad has nowhere to go but up these days made it an easy call. Being the default alternative to George W. Bush assured him a welcome mat.
Additionally, Obama could not have anticipated the witting or unwitting assistance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s observation to a German magazine that Obama’s plan for pulling out U.S. troops in 16 months after his election sounded about right to him.
Speaking in Arabic, as translated by The Washington Post, Maliki volunteered that “we think that this period might increase or decrease a little, but that it might be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”
The press office in the White House became so discombobulated that it inexplicably released to reporters here a Reuters report on Maliki’s comment. But soon thereafter, administration officials wokeup and asked Maliki’s office for a clarification, an invitation for a claim that the prime minister had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” which was duly issued.
The very next day, Maliki’s spokesman reported that “the Iraqi government sees a suitable date for withdrawal of U.S. forces … by the end of 2010,” only eight months longer than Obama has proposed. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, went into a tizzy, noting that Iraq as “a sovereign country” could say what it wanted, but the administration was sticking to its position of no explicit timetable.
By now, it was becoming harder and harder for the administration to isolate Obama as a solitary voice for irresponsibly pulling out of Iraq. Only a few days earlier, the White House itself had reported that Bush and Maliki had agreed to on a “time horizon” for the withdrawal of American forces, a vague construction in which Bush seemed inching toward a pullout time period.
All this served to keep Obama in the headlines in a way that cast him in accord with Maliki, rather than as the cut-and-run apostle of surrender that both Bush and Republican presidential rival John McCain have labored tirelessly to paint him.
McCain, grappling back home with the dismal state of the American economy, was visibly frustrated by the spotlight on Obama and the appearance that he seemed to be more in harmony than McCain with the sentiment in the Baghdad government.
Obama’s aides said he did not discuss with Maliki the matter of timetables for the U.S. troop withdrawal, but nevertheless he was riding on the crest of publicity about his active engagement in the pullout debate. McCain meanwhile was reduced to arguing that Obama had been wrong in saying the manpower surge in Iraq was a mistake and would fail, and is wrong now.
As has been the case all along in the calamitous narrative of Bush’s war of choice, the matter of judgment remains central. Throughout the long Democratic primary fight, Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton by repeating his early judgment that invading Iraq was wrong and pointing up her support of the resolution authorizing it.
Now the same basic judgment argument is being recycled for the November general election, with McCain staunchly clinging to his view that the war was necessary and Obama disagreeing. McCain has sought to separate himself from the early execution of the war and insisting that only when Bush agreed to the troop surge McCain recommended was progress achieved.
Obama in turn has used his early judgment that invading Iraq was a colossal mistake — a position now supported by two-thirds of Americans in the polls — to counter McCain’s central charge that his lack of military experience should disqualify him for service as the nation’s commander in chief.
Politically, all Obama had to do in navigating the political and diplomatic waters of his brief Middle East excursion was to get through it without a conspicuous gaffe or stirring up a new foreign policy controversy. He seems to have achieved that at cruise speed, and probably more.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington, D.C., for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
