Obama's visits to Afghanistan and Iraq, which Bush, McCain and their political advisers were eagerly expecting to prove a fiasco has instead proved to be a political masterstroke for the young Illinois senator who has clinched the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. He held serious substantive talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul and with Maliki in Baghdad and came out of both of them looking good.
In Kabul, Obama pledged to use the flexibility he would gain by pulling all 16 U.S. land forces combat brigades out of Iraq by sending another 10,000 American troops who would augment the 36,000 already based there.
In truth, we have our doubts whether Afghanistan can be "saved" in the Washington conception of the term even if 100,000 U.S. troops were to be put in there. Bush and his team have made the same mistake by dreaming they could remake Afghanistan "democratic" and America-loyal, an image that they tried to impose so disastrously on Iraq.
Bush has never learned that lesson about either country, and it appears that Obama still has to about Afghanistan. But at least, Obama's pledge has the advantage of offering a more realistic "surge" boost to current U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan.
In Baghdad, however, Obama scored a far bigger triumph. Maliki defied Bush and publicly backed Obama's plan to withdraw all 150,000 U.S. troops from the country within 16 months of taking office, or by mid-2010.
This bold stand by the underrated Iraqi leader should have come as no surprise. As we have noted in these columns, Maliki made clear publicly on July 7 that he would refuse to sign any Status of Forces Agreement – SOFA – with Washington unless it included a definitive pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat forces from his country by a clearly defined deadline in the near future.
Bush tried to waffle and obfuscate to play for time, string the Iraqis along, and squeeze the SOFA out of them without getting pinned down to any such firm commitment. But Maliki isn't having any of it. And now he and Obama have made common cause on the policy.
As a result, it is Bush and McCain who have been left looking like out-of-touch, ineffective old men. This perception was dramatically strengthened over the past week by the dramatic contrasts in photo ops between a young, dynamic, thoughtful and confident Obama offering realistic and sensible new policies, and clearly winning the respect of Karzai and Maliki, with the 72-year-old McCain sharing a golf cart with the current president's 84-year-old father. The timing could not have been worse, and it spoke mountains about the political ineptness of the McCain campaign.
The wave of change is gathering force against Bush and McCain at home in America as well as across the Middle East.