Much has been made in the past few days on the supposed recent or current converging of competing Iraq policies.
One significant item I came across, which I can’t find anyplace else is this account of Terry Moran’s interview with Barack Obama, part of which was played on Nightline yesterday. AFP reports the following, which apparently didn’t make Nightline:
Obama told Terry Moran on ABC’s “Nightline” that after being fiercely criticized for proposing a 16-month timeline for US troop withdrawal from Iraq, both Baghdad and the White House have now “suggested that we needed some kind of time horizon.“You know there was a whole verbiage around it, but there is a sense that we need to start to point to an end game here.”
In much the same way, the Illinois senator said, his suggestion months ago that two additional brigades were needed in Afghanistan was opposed by McCain, “and now there is convergence around the notion that we need at least two and maybe three brigades.”
Finally, Obama said he was “thrilled” after his much maligned proposal that the United States should talk with foes including Iran “to see a terrific diplomat, (Undersecretary of State) Bill Burns, now involved in conversation,” with Iran.
“They are not setting the world on fire yet, nevertheless, you are starting to see some movements,” Obama said regarding Washington’s overtures toward Tehran.
“So there is a convergence around a set of principles in terms of pursuing our foreign policy, that corresponds to a lot of the things I have been suggesting,” the 46-year-old senator told his ABC interviewer in Baghdad, where he arrived Monday for a two-day visit.
“And if you clear the underbrush of ideology and people having different positions, and arguing from different perspectives, at some point, you have to land on reality in order to make sure that the American people are safe.”
If this is accurate, it’s a sudden reversal in rhetorical strategy. He’d been playing the same strategey as his political opponents, Senators Clinton and McCain and President Bush, in stressing the differences in their Middle East policies and claiming his own as the best route to take.
Suddenly changing gears to a positive focus will leave McCain looking more and more obstructionist the longer he sticks with his continued strategy of attacking timetables and withdrawls, particularly as the White House does in fact begin to show some movement toward some things which very much resemble but certainly are not called a timetable or a withdrawl.
I’m also very disappointed in ABC for apparently failing to find this exchange newsworthy. At the time of tihs posting, the only mention I can find of this exchange is with the AFP. It’ll be interesting to see if Obama continues this tack.
