Not John McCain!  Ambinder reports:

“His [Maliki’s] domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”

This comes in response to the Spiegel report noted here.  This would seem to be a great coup for Obama, not least since it helps put to rest the charge that his claim in his NYT op-ed that Maliki took this view was based on a misunderstanding, but two things will minimise the political advantage Obama will derive from the episode: Obama’s position on withdrawal is, and for the most part has been, also “conditions-based,” and McCain’s campaign probably has a point that a majority of voters will be more interested in what military officers say about this than in what Maliki says.  However, they are probably most interested of all in what they think our government should do, and public support for withdrawal remains broad. 

Because the administration has closely tied itself to Maliki, it will be more difficult for McCain to dismiss Maliki’s opinion as entirely irrelevant.    What this McCain campaign spin should do is put an end to any question about Iraqi public opinion on withdrawal–as if the Iraqis have ever favoured a long-term American presence!  If Maliki is under significant political pressure to take such a stance publicly, that implies that a continued U.S. presence is very unpopular. 

Contrary to the concerns of my colleague John Schwenkler, this sort of anecdotal reporting does not reflect the overwhelming majority view in Iraq.  The January 2006 World Public Opinion survey of Iraqi opinion cited here is now over two years old, which is worth noting since almost three out of four Iraqis supported a timetable for withdrawal of no more than two years then.  Even with the intervening nightmarish violence of 2006, it is hard to imagine that public opinion has shifted so much that most Iraqis now want us to stay when two years ago 70% of them wanted us to be gone by now.  What is more, 87% supported the Iraqi government endorsing a timeline for withdrawal, and large majorities expected that security would improve in the wake of a withdrawal.  Indeed, as the September 2006 survey showed, despite the horrors of the summer of that year (or perhaps because of them), support for withdrawal remained basically unchanged.  Someone might object that this is old information, so what do newer surveys show? 

One March 2008 survey shows that U.S. forces have the confidence of just 20% of Iraqis, while 72% oppose the presence of U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq.  Opposition to the U.S. presence is higher than it was in 2005, but lower than it was last year, but even in 2005 opposition was at 51%.  With respect to the “surge,” 53% of Iraqis still said as of March that the “surge” had made things worse in the areas where the “surge” took place and only 36% believed that it made things better.  As a political matter, it seems significant that a majority of Iraqis deemed the new tactical plan a failure despite the moderate improvements that it has actually achieved.  43% said that the “surge” made the conditions for political dialogue worse.  That’s a significant change from the 70% who said that the summer before, but most of those who no longer thought the “surge” had made conditions worse simply said that it had no effect.  Of course, these figures point to the fundamental, extremely strong opposition to the U.S. presence of about 40% of the population and to the 38% who want U.S. forces to leave now.  Just 29% of Iraqis think that a departure of U.S. forces would worsen the security situation.  So, yes, you can find Iraqis who will take that view, but they are not representative of most of their countrymen.             

Here at home, as a late June CNN survey found, 64% of Americans want the next President to remove most U.S. troops from Iraq “within a few months of taking office.”  Obviously, no major candidate is proposing a withdrawal that is this rapid, so what is remarkable is how much support this receives.   

Update: Ambinder earlier posed the problem for McCain this way:

To argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing.

But this view is implicit in McCain’s support for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.  I suppose ignoring or dismissing Maliki’s comments, as the campaign has now done, helps to make this clear to more people, but at the heart of support for a large, ongoing U.S. presence on Iraqi soil is the assumption that Iraqi sovereignty basically does mean nothing.  This would be roughly consistent with a foreign policy that has regarded Iraqi sovereignty as meaningless for the last 17 years.

Second Update: The McCain campaign seems to think that talking about the “surge” is the answer to all problems.  This is what I am wondering: outside of the bubble of elite commentary, does a candidate’s position on the “surge” matter very much?  McCain has to believe that it does, and he has been riding this one-trick pony of a campaign theme for at least the last eight months.  If I were working for Obama, I would advise driving home how dishonestly McCain represented Romney’s position on the ”surge” as a call for surrender.  This was a complete distortion, everyone knew that it was a complete distortion, many people called McCain on it, but his aura of invulnerability on questions of war made all of that irrelevant and he won the Florida primary–and propelled himself on to winning the nomination–anyway.  The Obama campaign could use this to make the argument that McCain believes that everyone who expresses reasonable doubt and skepticism about a Bush administration plan wants to surrender to Al Qaeda, which could go a long way towards revealing McCain as an unserious and fairly fanatical person. 

The response could go something like this: “The Bush administration prosecuted the war in Iraq incompetently for years, so when the Bush administration proposed sending additional troops to an unnecessary war that has harmed our interests Barack Obama correctly challenged and questioned the wisdom of endorsing yet another plan put forward by a failed President.  John McCain accepted this plan without hesitation, because he has had a record of reflexively calling for the escalation of armed conflicts for the last ten years.  Now the administration is starting to embrace key diplomatic aspects of the Baker-Hamilton Report’s recommendations that Barack Obama endorsed, but which this administration and John McCain rejected at the time.  John McCain offers four years of the same kind of leadership that failed us in Iraq, and our country cannot afford to take that path.”      

Someone might also note that 51% of the public still believes that things are going badly in Iraq as recently as last week.  For it to make any sense, running on the “surge” has to take for granted that a majority accepts that things are going reasonably well.  If a majority still holds that things are going badly even after the “surge,” which has now ended, how does this really help the pro-”surge” candidate?  Wouldn’t the perception that things are going badly despite the “surge” inspire a view that it is futile to remain in Iraq any longer? 

In the official McCain campaign response, it says, “We would not be in the position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama’s views had prevailed.”  That’s true–had Obama’s stated views prevailed last year, our forces would have already been withdrawn from Iraq for four months by now.  If someone were thinking over at McCain HQ, they would realise that they are obsessed with reminding voters that McCain has supported perpetuating the war in Iraq for the last year and a half when it theoretically could already have been over. 

Third Update: Via The Caucus comes word that Maliki’s team is rapidly backtracking and claiming that Maliki did not say what everyone thinks that he said.  If so, that would make it the second time in the last two weeks that Maliki has more or less endorsed the idea of a timetable for withdrawal and then explained that he has been completely misunderstood or misquoted.  The first quoted statement was one put out by his office and taken from remarks he gave in the UAE, but this second one was made directly by Maliki to a German magazine that should be able to confirm what Maliki actually said.  This will give some comfort to the McCain campaign, since it definitely weakens whatever impact the earlier statements would have had.      

Filed under: politics, foreign policy