Poor McCain. Even the Iraqi government has endorsed Obama. McCain doesn't get it: no one wins.

McCain opposes a timetable for us to get out of there. Obama favors one.
Now Nouri al-Maliki, the head of the (US-backed) Iraqi government, ostensibly
now freely elected (according to the Bush administration), has also spoken
out in favor of a timetable for US withdrawal.

Hear the radical right scream: this plays into the hands of terrrrrists! This
is just what the Ayatollahs want! This is surrender! We are winning! Right,
we have been winning for five years now. I've won enough, thanks. No one wins.
We all lost when Cheneybush decided to lead us into this mess in the first place,
and it was like a head-on car collision. No one wins. There are just the injured
and the less badly injured. There are only losers. No one wins.

Our money is gone. Our prestige is gone. The lives of thousands of our people are
lost. The lives of tens, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are lost. No one wins.

We will either get out of there and watch the mess, or we will stay there, and be
part of the mess. Chevron and Halliburton will get some more contracts, and at the
relatively small expense of a few sacrificed personnel (kidnappings, bombings, etc),
but their profits come out of our pockets, and their names are mud for any future
Democratic administration, and their personnel are targets for legal scrutiny in the
USA and attacks abroad. No one wins.

Al-Maliki knows that there will be no internal reconciliation in Iraq as long as we
maintain a large visible military presence there. He also knows that there could well
be no internal reconciliation even after we leave. But if the antagonists there know
that they have a chance to carve out their territorial enclaves with a relative degree
of autonomy, at some point they will realize a fundamental truth of third world conflicts:
empty bellies start wars, full bellies in their right minds don't, because if they do,
no one wins.


It's too late to reverse the damage. We started this misbegotten horror. We have to end
our involvement in it with some kind of orderly withdrawal, and we have to try our best
to leave SOME kind of authority there, and cheer if it holds and makes progress, and wring
our hands in despair if it doesn't. The one option that we KNOW doesn't work is the status
quo. If the so-called surge has quieted things down somewhat, it only means we are BOGGED
down somewhat more than we were. It also means that McCain has his justification for threatening
my as yet unborn grandchildren with military service in Iraq as an enemy combatant. At some
point, he will learn that until he has more Americans in Iraq than Iraqis, no one wins.

No wonder al-Maliki has endorsed the idea of a timetable, which is, coincidentally, Obama's
position. He has done so because without one, we can surge until we have sent everyone over
there we could find except the secretarial staff of the Kalamazoo Police Department and the
admissions collectors at the entrance to Cape Cod National Seashore. No one wins.