More on Iraq Troop Withdrawals

So it looks like the President has been presented with yet another opportunity to essentially declare victory and get out of Iraq. The problem is that Republicans would rather use the issue of American troop withdrawals as an election-year bludgeon against Democrats who have essentially been echoing the same sentiments as Maliki and his key cabinet ministers on the one hand and the American public in general on the other. Yet another obstacle here is that it is becoming increasingly apparent that the White House doesn't want to leave Iraq because, simply put, they want to stay in Iraq (See here and here).

Last week, Newsweek reported that the national reconciliation plan presented by Maliki this past Sunday would include a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. As TNR's Spencer Ackerman noted at the time, such a plan seemed like the perfect escape route for the Bush administration from Iraq. Moreover, it looked like it could shield the Bush administration from criticism from the right in that it was the Iraqis - not the Democrats or Europeans or whatever - who were actually asking us to leave! However, when the actual plan was revealed on Sunday, a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops was conspicuously absent. Why exactly this was the case is anyone's guess but the most plausible explanation seems to be that the U.S. wasn't too keen on "a plan that depended on exploiting hatred of us to unite the country."

In what is increasingly becoming the conventional wisdom, some kind of plan for a significant drawdown of U.S. forces is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for any serious dialogue between the Iraqi government and insurgents. Instead of reflexively dismissing withdrawal as appeasement, the Bush administration needs to take advantage of the recent openings provided by Maliki and some Sunni insurgent groups. Polyannish platitudes about "staying the course" or "we must endure until the insurgency is defeated" are giving Americans a skewed view of what is required in Iraq.