Not That It Matters

by digby

The news media has been so riveted on the tiresome non-story of the vice presidential pick that this piece of interesting news passed with little comment. Dan Froomkin unpacks it deftly:

In agreeing to pull U.S. combat troops out of Iraqi cities by June, and from the rest of the country by 2011, President Bush has apparently consented to precisely the kind of timetable that, when Democrats called for one, he dismissed as “setting a date for failure.” Bush can call it an “aspirational goal” until he turns blue, but a timetable is exactly what it is, thank you very much.

Bush has repeatedly warned that politics and public opinion should have no role in the decision about when to leave Iraq, but apparently he just meant American politics and public opinion. A clear majority of Americans has favored a withdrawal timetable for several years now, putting anti-war Democrats in control of Congress in 2006.

Bush ignored them. But in the end, he bowed to the will of the Iraqis’ elected representatives. After five and a half years of occupation, it was their turn to put a gun to Bush’s head: The timetable was the price they demanded for agreeing to let American troops remain in the country beyond the expiration of a United Nations mandate in December.

Bush’s acquiescence pulls the rug out from under Republican presidential candidate John McCain, whose position on Iraq was largely identical to Bush’s — pre-backflip. In some ways, the new timetable is even shorter than the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

So how is this not exactly what Bush had previously decried as an invitation to disaster?

I don’t know. This could be an extremely important political moment but I can’t see how it’s going to play. Will it be that the Republicans have finally acquiesced to reality and are accepting the terms that Obama has been pushing for some time, as Froomkin suggests? Or will it suggest that the brilliant military leader John McCain was right about the surge which led to our glorious victory?

The coverage has been so muddled that I can’t tell yet what the political take-away will be for this. Maybe nothing at all. One thing’s for sure: it’s a testimony to their puerile obsession with shiny objects that the TV gasbags spent an entire two days bloviating about something quite dull that was going to be announced shortly and didn’t pay any attention at all to something important that already had been.

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