>>> CB: Isn't McCain going to win ? He's the war candidate.
>>>
>>
>> I haven't the slightest idea who is going to win -- but McCain _is_
>> the
>> candidate most apt to pull out of Iraq. His warlike reputation
>> provides
>> cover for cutting and running...
>>
>> Carrol
>>
>
> Not exactly what I had in mind.
> I think McCain is in this for the long haul. He'll never admit defeat.
> He laments the "loss" in Vietnam and he's going to "win" this time.
> A Rep Prez gives the Dems the cover they need to end funding.
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American foreign policy is "bipartisan", and how the US proceeds in Iraq
will, IMO, depend mostly on the political and military situation there and
in the broader Middle East, and much less on the personal convictions or
attributes of the candidates.
This will be the case under a Democratic or a McCain administration, and with the Congress firmly controlled by the Democrats. There's nowhere near the gulf implied between the two parties by McCain's suggestion of a US troop presence "for a hundred years" and Clinton's pledge yesterday to start withdrawing troops within her first 60 days as president - campaign rhetoric aimed at at their respective bases.
Both parties accept the need to progressively withdraw American troops from the major population centres and to disengage from combat operations. Both parties say that conditions - ie. the perception that the US is not being routed - will dictate the pace of such withdrawal.
Both parties affirm that US troops will not be withdrawn so far as to not be able to come back in if its interests in Iraq are threatened, whether to just "over the horizon" bases in Kuwait, or from possible air and special forces bases in the Iraqi desert or Kurdish territory. McCain has been careful to explain that is what he means by staying in Iraq "for a hundred years", but not in such as way as to continue incurring American casualties at the rate seen during the past nearly five years, or having to institute a draft.
So I don't place much store in any of the candidates when they talk about their "differences" on Iraq, or that one is in a better position than another to effect an "honourable" withdrawal. They're all equally hoping to remove US forces early by declaring stability has returned to the country. They're all equally hoping the Iraqi militias will accept the authority of their respective political leaders in government after and if a power- and revenue-sharing agreement is finally brokered by the US; that the intercommunal violence subsides, partly because most of the ethnic cleansing has already occured and because the US has created a military balance between the two sides; and that all of the neighbouring states, notably the Iranians, want to avoid a wider regional war. McCain is just more skeptical - at least publicly -about how long the process will take, and he looks to be vulnerable on that account.
But US policy in Iraq under a new DP or RP administration will represent continuity rather than discontinuity with the Bush administration's extended military and political maneuvering to extricate itself from a trap of its own making.