Charles Krauthammer has an especially misguided op-ed in today’s Washington Post regarding the way the McCain campaign should treat the Iraq War issue. If McCain followed the Krauthammer book on political strategy, he would make Iraq the main tenent of his campaign:

[Obama’s] is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq war the central winning plank of his campaign. Yes, Americans are war-weary. Yes, most think we should not have engaged in the first place. Yes, Obama will keep pulling out his 2002 speech opposing the war.

But McCain’s case is simple. Is not Obama’s central mantra that this election is about the future, not the past? It is about 2009, not 2002. Obama promises that upon his inauguration, he will order the Joint Chiefs to bring him a plan for withdrawal from Iraq within 16 months. McCain says that upon his inauguration, he’ll ask the Joint Chiefs for a plan for continued and ultimate success.

It takes a certain amount of audacity to argue that a war that nearly seventy percent of the country disapproves of could possibly be used by a candidate to win a major national election. But Krauthammer’s delusions over the American public’s reception of “progress” on the ground is indicative of mainstream neocon frustrations over the war. Indeed, Krauthammer never even attempts to cite polls or reports that may suggest that Americans are more receptive to a pro-war message. To him, the case for our continued presence in Iraq is so blatantly clear, so obviously self-evident, that pushing the war issue must work!

He is appalled that Obama would want to withdraw within 16 months of entering the White House. The American people will never go for that, he seems to be implying. Unfortunately for Krauthammer, and despite his diligent attempts over the past few years to convince Americans that withdrawal would be devastating to American interests, over sixty percent of Americans (according to the most recent CBS News Poll) want American troops out of Iraq in less than two years.

Krauthammer correctly asserts that:

The choice could not be more clearly drawn. The Democrats’ one objective in Iraq is withdrawal. McCain’s one objective is victory.

He could just as easily state this another way. The American people overwhelmingly believe that our objective in Iraq should be withdrawal. McCain’s one objective is a decades long military presence there. Regardless of Krauthammer’s own personal feelings on the issue, to claim that focusing an enormous amount of energy on arguing the case for a sustained military presence in Iraq would be a ticket to victory for McCain is, for lack of better words, completely delusional.