Last week, both the Bush administration and John McCain found themselves shifting in the direction of positions Barack Obama had long espoused in terms of talks with Iran and in terms of the need for more troops in Afghanistan. More recently, Bush seemed to be edging toward embracing a timetable for withdrawal and now Maliki has explicitly embraced the Obama position on the need for a timetable.

This leaves us with two questions — one is whether McCain will make this the third issue on which he’s following Obama’s lead, and the other is whether the press will note that his constant flip-flopping undermines the two core themes of his campaign, “straight talk” and alleged national security expertise.

Looks like the White House accidentally pushed out the story of Maliki endorsing the Obama plan for Iraq to their email distribution list.

Nancy Pelosi referring to Maliki’s increasingly insistent calls for a timeline for US withdrawal from Iraq says “the end could be in sight” and calls for “a high-level meeting with the Iraqis to work out the terms of our redeployment from Iraq” but cautions that this “will not happen without the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States.”

John Mueller’s ideas about subjecting counter-terrorism security measures to some kind of meaningful cost-benefit analysis seem very sensible to me. Very sensible and very unlikely to be adopted.

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

It’s unremarkable on its own terms for someone to tell a periodical that they think Barack Obama is basically right about Iraq, but in this case the person talking is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki being interviewed by Der Spiegel so that seems pretty noteworthy. We shouldn’t slavishly adhere to whatever the Iraqi government happens to want (if they say we need 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for the next 20 years, we need to tell them no way) but as even John McCain and George Bush used to admit if the Iraqis want us to leave we really have to leave.

Maliki here — and for the past couple of weeks more broadly — is addressing himself to the most fundamental “facts on the ground” in Iraq of all, the gross unpopularity of the American military presence. Under those circumstances, only real desperation (such as the terrible situation prevailing in 2006) makes it make sense for Maliki to uncritically endorse an open-ended presence. Whatever it is he would like to get from US forces (and you’ve got to believe it’s plenty, given that plenty of security issues still exist for Iraq) the larger imperative is to get it in the context of also getting a plan to get Iraq’s sovereignty back.