John McCain has Obama in a box? Looks like the box just collapsed in on McCain.
On Friday Prime Minister al-Maliki (or 'Cheeky Maliki' as he isn't known at the White House) let it be known he'd prefer American troops to be out of Iraq within sixteen months - the same timetable as Obama has set. After a phone call from the White House - during which, I'm sure, satellites melted - Maliki walked it back, claiming he'd been mistranslated (because, of course, the word for 'indefinitely' in Arabic is sometimes used to mean 'within sixteen months').
Maliki knew exactly what he was doing; he was making a deliberate - and from the McCain and Bush points of view, very unwelcome - intervention in the American election campaign. The more say he has in when the troops go home, the better for him. His newfound boldness is very bad news for McCain. He can't say, on the one hand, that American troops should stay for longer than two years in large numbers and indefinitely in smaller numbers and, on the other hand, that they should stay until the Iraqis want them to go. If Maliki sticks to this position or something like it, then McCain can't really disagree with him without finding a more imperialistic rationale for the occupation. But American voters aren't up for imperialism, never have been. If the Iraqis want them out, they'll be more than happy to get out.
All of which means Iraq - which McCain had hoped to turn into the central issue of the campaign - may well recede as an issue. Which means the economy will dominate the debate more than ever. Not McCain's strong suit. No wonder one of his occasional advisers, responding to Friday's reports, resorted to undiplomatic language to express his reaction: "We're fucked."
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