You can listen to Marc Lynch, Colin Kahl, and Rand Beers talk about the latest developments from Iraq if you’re tired of just reading some blogger guy mouth off. They very effectively put these events into the larger context of events in Iraqi politics that went undernoticed until Maliki’s statements exploded onto the campaign scene.

Note to would-be imperialists — my advice would be to stop trying to lamely spin away the content of what Nouri al-Maliki is saying and take the Andy McArthy route of deriding him as an Iranian stooge. Surely the US security establishment hasn’t lost the ability to engineer a coup or whatever in a country currently under American military operation. Maybe Iyad Allawi would like to play host to American toops for 100 years.

Here’s the video of Maliki’s aid walking back the walkback on a timetable for withdrawal:

It seems to me that, one good reason for the Iraqi government to take a welcoming attitude toward something like Obama’s plan is that this gives them some meaningful bargaining power. I think common sense dictates that Obama would be willing to change a 16 month timetable into an 18 month timetable if the Iraqi government can put forward some persuasive reasons why 18 is better than 16. But to get in that conversation, you need to be rowing in the same direction as the new president — and the American people and the Iraqi people — and looking to find some definitive light at the end of the tunnel.

I’ve got a TAP Online piece about Maliki’s bombshell and the election:

“Mr. Obama can’t afford to update his Iraq policy,” sniffed a July 7 Washington Post editorial that simultaneously accused Obama of changing his position on Iraq and of not changing his position on Iraq enough. By July 15 it was clear that Obama was sticking to his guns, and the Post was mad, sneering that Obama “appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.” Similar sentiments have been echoed on television and, of course, by the McCain campaign which deemed it “remarkable” that Obama “articulated and announced his policies and approach to Iraq before he went, not after.”

But a funny thing happened while Obama’s plane was en route to its first stop in Afghanistan — Der Spiegel published an interview with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in which the Iraqi leader took a rather different view. “U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months,” he observed, “that, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Read the rest.

More lame spinning from Randy Scheunemann, who likes to bribe about his ability to subvert US foreign policy for financial gain, about Iraq: “Obama’s judgment in Iraq has been universally wrong.”

Is this really the take the McCain campaign wants? That Obama’s judgment that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States was wrong? That his judgment that the war could prompt a long and costly occupation was wrong? That his judgment that the war could allow the Taliban and al-Qaeda to regroup in Central Asia was wrong? That all seems pretty indisputably right to me.

John McCain, like all decent Americans, is concerned about the trouble on the Iraq-Pakistan border. Ali Frick, like a typical liberal, derides this on the grounds that there is no such border. But if she had McCain’s years of foreign policy expertise and extensive conversations with John McCain she would have access to this double super-secret map of the CENTCOM AOR:

I won my school’s geography bee, so I know what I’m talking about. Here’s the last time I tried to help McCain out with a map.

Meredith Viera asks John McCain about the fact that the Iraqi government keeps praising his opponent‘s vision of forward-looking Iraq policy. McCain retorts:

I have been there too many times. I’ve met too many times with him, and I know what they want. They want it based on conditions and of course they would like to have us out, that’s what happens when you win wars, you leave. We may have a residual presence there as even Senator Obama has admitted. But the fact is that it should be — the agreement between Prime Minister Maliki, the Iraqi government and the United states is it will be based on conditions. This is a great success, but it’s fragile, and could be reversed very easily. I think we should trust the word of General Petraeus who has orchestrated this dramatic turnaround.

A few points. Clearly, it would be a bad idea to totally ignore the views of General Petraeus at CENTCOM. And you’re also going to want to talk to General Odierno commanding US forces in Iraq. And you’re going to want to talk to a variety of other civilian and military officials responsible for US policy in Iraq and around the region. You don’t want to just ignore anyone’s point of view. But by the same token you can’t ignore Maliki’s perspective. That’s not even a question of Maliki versus Petraeus, it’s a question of Maliki’s views being relevant to Petraeus giving any serious assessment of the situation. Until these past couple of weeks it wasn’t even controversial to say that if the Iraqi government wants us to go, we should go. The debate was about whether we should go even if they want us to stay.

Second — the arrogance on display here is stunning. McCain is saying we should ignore the expressed views of the Iraqi government because he knows (through telepathy? experience? “cred”?) that secretly these aren’t their views. That’s ridiculous.

Ali al-Dabbagh says in English that the Iraqi government thinks US troops should be out of Iraq by 2010. Barack Obama’s plan for Iraq would, of course, have US troops out of Iraq by 2010.

For some reason, the NYT chose to bury their lead about the Maliki endorsement of Barack Obama’s Iraq plans. CENTCOM wants us to think that endorsement was a mistranslation, but Der Spiegel has tapes and the tapes show Maliki in Arabic endorsing Obama’s view:

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

Note also the following hilarious moment in lack of self-awareness on the part of at least one US military officer:

But a senior military official in Iraq said top American commanders expressed surprise and confusion over Mr. Maliki’s published remarks. The official added, however, that no American officers spoke to the Iraqi prime minister or any of his top aides about them.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened with the prime minister,” said the senior military official, noting that Mr. Maliki or his top aides had had to issue clarifications previously of comments that Iraqi or foreign journalists reported the prime minister said. “All of us were going, ‘What? What did he say, why did he say it and was it accurate?’”

Because in fantasytown, the fact that Maliki repeatedly endorses a timetable and keeps being forced by the Bush administration to walk it back undermines the authenticity of his support for withdrawal. Back in realityville, Maliki keeps saying this because he wants us to set a timeline, viewing this as the only politically feasible way forward.