Following Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s declaration of support for a 16-month withdrawal timeline from Iraq, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been struggling to respond. He spent most of this week railing against any “artificial timetable” for withdrawal from Iraq, vaguely insisting that the U.S. will withdraw only “with victory”:

“[Obama showed] ‘a remarkable failure to understand the facts on the ground’ by continuing to call for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq on a fixed timetable.” [Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/24/08]

“An artificial timetable based on political expediency would have led to disaster and could still turn success into defeat,” Mr. McCain said. [New York Times, 7/19/08]

McCAIN: So the fact is that we have succeeded. We are winning. They’ll come home with honor. And it won’t be just at a set timetable. [CBS interview, 7/22/08]

But in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer today, McCain seemed to endorse the idea of a timetable. When asked if Maliki would “persist” in requesting a 16-month withdrawal timetable from Iraq, McCain responded, “He won’t. … I know him.” McCain then praised Maliki’s 16-month timetable:

BLITZER: So why do you think he said that 16 months is basically a pretty good timetable?

McCAIN: He said it’s a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground. I think it’s a pretty good timetable, as we should — or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground.

Watch it:

Indeed, as McCain told former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney during a presidential debate in January: “Timetables was the buzzword for those that wanted to get out.”

Our guest blogger is P.J. Crowley, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Homeland Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the Obama campaign acknowledged that it is already focused on transition planning. The retort from the McCain campaign was to call this an example of “poor judgment.” On the contrary, it demonstrates a campaign that really understands the complex world and pressures that the next president will face.

This interesting exchange between the McCain and Obama campaigns says a lot about not only which candidate has experience, but what he is actually doing with that experience. What is interesting is that the action and reaction is contradicted by current political perceptions.

With apologies to Jules Verne, you may be able to go around the world in 80 days, but you cannot form a government in such a short time. The British have a formal concept of a shadow government, since in a parliamentary system, transitions can occur fairly rapidly. The United States does not, and the period between November 4 and January 20 is hardly enough time for a president-elect to win, celebrate, recruit and vet a substantial senior leadership team that he knows will work effectively together and ensure that his essential policy pillars are on realistic footing.

If we learned anything from 9/11, it is that world events won’t wait for the new president to get his feet on the ground. The Bush administration was unfocused. Only a fraction of its leadership was in place, and it was seriously divided on major policy questions and governing philosophy. Policies were made up as events went along. Major mistakes were made, such as a trillion dollar conflict in Iraq largely unrelated to al Qaeda.

Here at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, we have launched a Homeland Security Presidential Transition Initiative to help the president-elect, regardless of who wins, assess what will need to be done during the transition and in the first year to keep the country safe. We hope to create a dialogue on these issues before November. The campaigns must be thinking and planning as well, even if homeland security is not a major campaign issue.

Why is this important? Attempted attacks have become a staple of groups like al Qaeda. Given this heightened risk, one of our earliest conclusions was that the two candidates cannot wait until November to focus on this challenge. Advance work will be necessary to have an effective leadership team ready, establish relationships with key stakeholders across the country, prepare the public for what lies ahead and outline concrete priorities for the first 100 days and first year in office.

This is not being presumptuous. Actually, it is being presidential.

In his 1999 book, A Charge To Keep, President Bush said he had “learned the lessons of Vietnam” about “never again ask[ing] the military to fight a political war.” After launching the Iraq war, in April 2004, Bush rejected the analogy that Iraq was turning into a quagmire like Vietnam:

Q: How do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

BUSH: I think the analogy is false.

Last August, however, President Bush reversed course and embraced the Vietnam analogy, stating Vietnam taught us that “the price of America’s withdrawal” is steep and painful.

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reveals that the real similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is in the price of staying. In constant FY2008 dollars, the Vietnam war cost the U.S. $686 billion. The Iraq war, at just over five years old, is priced at $648 billion:

CRS notes, “All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and do not reflect costs of veterans benefits, interest on war-related debt, or assistance to allies.” Thus, the actual costs of the Iraq war are likely much greater, as Nobel Prize economist Joe Stiglitz reported in his book, The Three Trillion Dollar War.

It is unlikely, however, that the White House is concerned about these mounting costs. In October, the CBO conservatively said the wars may cost $2 trillion over the next decade. “I’m not worried about the number,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in response, calling the estimate “pure speculation.”

Indeed, “the price of America’s withdrawal” from Iraq may be an alternative that Bush should strongly consider.