If Ambinder is right, the talk of a McCain VP selection this week is a diversion to try to drum up some positive coverage.  However, it cannot be encouraging for admirers of Jindal and proponents of rational decision-making in the McCain campaign (ha!) that McCain is headed to Louisiana to meet with Jindal.  Rod’s reasonable VP speculation based on these reports may unfortunately be all too accurate.  As I have said several times before, selecting Jindal would be a grave mistake for McCain and it would be bad news for Jindal, Louisiana and the Republican Party.  It would be the Republicans’ political equivalent of eating their seed corn.  Bobby Jindal will do a lot of people an enormous service, not least to the people who voted for him, if he turns down any McCain offer he may receive. 

Quin Hillyer is correct in his new article on this subject that Jindal should be towards the bottom of a long list of possible nominees, and his reasoning also makes sense:

But fergoshsakes, the guy really does need some seasoning. He has never stayed in any one job long enough — much less an elective political post — to be required to fight off a backlash by bad-ol’-boys who have had time to re-mobilize against him. And he still comes across, in a way Barack Obama doesn’t, as really young. Finally, the national press will be chomping at the bit to turn a few quirks from his admirable social conservatism into something that comes across as a little too extreme and weird.

There is also the added factor that having an extremely young running mate for the oldest nominee for President is likely to go down poorly with those reasonably concerned about the VP being able to act as a competent successor immediately.  For that reason, having a VP nominee with more executive experience than Jindal has seems to me to be imperative, so I think Pawlenty makes much more sense at this point.

Andy McCarthy offers this reminder:

As I’ve mentioned before, Maliki, of the Shiite Dawa Party which opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place, has long-standing ties to Iran and Syria — and has expressed support for Hezbollah.  The only thing that surprises me about this story is that anyone is surprised. 

McCarthy is entirely right in what he says here, but that raises a couple questions.  First, there is the obvious question of why the U.S. is attempting to pursue a strategy premised on limiting Iranian influence in Iraq and the region while actively backing a government that has no intention of limiting Iranian influence in Iraq and very clearly is led by a sectarian party.  Then there is the question of whether McCain understands any of this when his rejected NYT op-ed states quite clearly that he does not consider Maliki and his government to be sectarian. 

According to the version on Drudge, McCain wrote:

Nor do they [progress benchmarks] measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

Leaving aside that Maliki’s actions regarding Basra and Sadr City were part of intra-Shi’ite feuding in the name of establishing the authority of the central government, this statement by McCain shows that he does not understand the nature of the Iraqi government.  (Maliki’s targeting of other Shi’ite groups obviously would not in itself imply non-sectarianism, but would only prove that he wants his faction of Shi’ites to be dominant within the Shi’ite majority.)  Even more than creating a political problem for McCain back home, Maliki’s recent statements have revealed both the untenability of a continued U.S. presence in Iraq and the complete incoherence of U.S. strategy in that country.

My suggestion to Obama: forget Berlin, go to Mecca. ~Tony Campbell

If non-Muslims were allowed to enter Mecca, that would at least be possible, if not very desirable.  Of course, what this suggestion accomplishes is to link Obama’s “unique heritage” (as Campbell calls it) with a trip to Mecca, which is permitted only to Muslims.  Even if the Saudis were inclined to grant an exception, which they almost certainly wouldn’t be, in the eyes of a great many Americans going there would be like carrying around a placard saying, “Yes, I am a Muslim.”  The fewer people who try to help Obama with this sort of advice, the better off he will be.

So while McCain’s allegation is technically true, Obama has been far from absent on this issue, and it’s misleading for McCain to imply that he has. ~Dylan Matthews

There are only two problems with the Biden defense of Obama on this point: Obama was absent from two of the three full committee meetings and in the one meeting he did attend he asked one question that Biden subsequently mocked during the presidential campaign as unrelated to Afghanistan.  The relevant point to make against McCain’s use of this is that McCain has been absent from all such relevant hearings, which means that both candidates have been neglecting their responsibilities during the campaign.  That’s much better!

On the main blog, Leon Hadar notes the administration’s new “time horizon” language, and I agree with those who are saying that this is a way of claiming that the administration is not interested in an indefinite presence in Iraq without making any meaningful commitment as to when that presence will be ended.  This is not really a shift, as the NYT would have it, so much as it is yet another rhetorical dodge.  Officially, the administration has always wanted to leave Iraq as quickly as possible, and we all know that this claim is not credible.  The difference between such a horizon and a firm timetable is clear enough: the former can be revised and allowed to recede far off into the future, while a timetable ought to mean that there are certain dates by which such-and-such a number of troops must be withdrawn with a final target date for removing all combat troops.  To the extent that anyone links a timetable to conditions, as Obama has done, he is leaving the door open to the same kind of perpetual revision and delay that the “time horizon” concept already allows.  In this, he is not really doing anything new, but that isn’t really reassuring, as The Nation noted earlier this week:

That said, Obama’s Iraq plan has always left the door open for what could become an “occupation of undetermined length” under a Democratic President.  Even as he rejects permanent US military bases in Iraq, Obama has said that no timetable should be “overly rigid.” He has indicated that he would “work with our military commanders” to determine a withdrawal plan. He has supported the presence of residual troops, which could number as many as 80,000, to guard a militarized embassy, combat terrorism and provide training and assistance to the Iraqi government.   

These positions, which he echoed in his Iraq speech on July 15, are not new, but they do raise the concern that Obama’s pledge to end the war on a timetable could become subordinated to a shifting landscape of worst-case scenarios that impose new and unachievable conditions for withdrawal.

Not John McCain!  Ambinder reports:

“His [Maliki’s] domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”

This comes in response to the Spiegel report noted here.  This would seem to be a great coup for Obama, not least since it helps put to rest the charge that his claim in his NYT op-ed that Maliki took this view was based on a misunderstanding, but two things will minimise the political advantage Obama will derive from the episode: Obama’s position on withdrawal is, and for the most part has been, also “conditions-based,” and McCain’s campaign probably has a point that a majority of voters will be more interested in what military officers say about this than in what Maliki says.  However, they are probably most interested of all in what they think our government should do, and public support for withdrawal remains broad. 

Because the administration has closely tied itself to Maliki, it will be more difficult for McCain to dismiss Maliki’s opinion as entirely irrelevant.    What this McCain campaign spin should do is put an end to any question about Iraqi public opinion on withdrawal–as if the Iraqis have ever favoured a long-term American presence!  If Maliki is under significant political pressure to take such a stance publicly, that implies that a continued U.S. presence is very unpopular. 

Contrary to the concerns of my colleague John Schwenkler, this sort of anecdotal reporting does not reflect the overwhelming majority view in Iraq.  The January 2006 World Public Opinion survey of Iraqi opinion cited here is now over two years old, which is worth noting since almost three out of four Iraqis supported a timetable for withdrawal of no more than two years then.  Even with the intervening nightmarish violence of 2006, it is hard to imagine that public opinion has shifted so much that most Iraqis now want us to stay when two years ago 70% of them wanted us to be gone by now.  What is more, 87% supported the Iraqi government endorsing a timeline for withdrawal, and large majorities expected that security would improve in the wake of a withdrawal.  Indeed, as the September 2006 survey showed, despite the horrors of the summer of that year (or perhaps because of them), support for withdrawal remained basically unchanged.  Someone might object that this is old information, so what do newer surveys show? 

One March 2008 survey shows that U.S. forces have the confidence of just 20% of Iraqis, while 72% oppose the presence of U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq.  Opposition to the U.S. presence is higher than it was in 2005, but lower than it was last year, but even in 2005 opposition was at 51%.  With respect to the “surge,” 53% of Iraqis still said as of March that the “surge” had made things worse in the areas where the “surge” took place and only 36% believed that it made things better.  As a political matter, it seems significant that a majority of Iraqis deemed the new tactical plan a failure despite the moderate improvements that it has actually achieved.  43% said that the “surge” made the conditions for political dialogue worse.  That’s a significant change from the 70% who said that the summer before, but most of those who no longer thought the “surge” had made conditions worse simply said that it had no effect.  Of course, these figures point to the fundamental, extremely strong opposition to the U.S. presence of about 40% of the population and to the 38% who want U.S. forces to leave now.  Just 29% of Iraqis think that a departure of U.S. forces would worsen the security situation.  So, yes, you can find Iraqis who will take that view, but they are not representative of most of their countrymen.             

Here at home, as a late June CNN survey found, 64% of Americans want the next President to remove most U.S. troops from Iraq “within a few months of taking office.”  Obviously, no major candidate is proposing a withdrawal that is this rapid, so what is remarkable is how much support this receives.   

Update: Ambinder earlier posed the problem for McCain this way:

To argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing.

But this view is implicit in McCain’s support for permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.  I suppose ignoring or dismissing Maliki’s comments, as the campaign has now done, helps to make this clear to more people, but at the heart of support for a large, ongoing U.S. presence on Iraqi soil is the assumption that Iraqi sovereignty basically does mean nothing.  This would be roughly consistent with a foreign policy that has regarded Iraqi sovereignty as meaningless for the last 17 years.

Second Update: The McCain campaign seems to think that talking about the “surge” is the answer to all problems.  This is what I am wondering: outside of the bubble of elite commentary, does a candidate’s position on the “surge” matter very much?  McCain has to believe that it does, and he has been riding this one-trick pony of a campaign theme for at least the last eight months.  If I were working for Obama, I would advise driving home how dishonestly McCain represented Romney’s position on the “surge” as a call for surrender.  This was a complete distortion, everyone knew that it was a complete distortion, many people called McCain on it, but his aura of invulnerability on questions of war made all of that irrelevant and he won the Florida primary–and propelled himself on to winning the nomination–anyway.  The Obama campaign could use this to make the argument that McCain believes that everyone who expresses reasonable doubt and skepticism about a Bush administration plan wants to surrender to Al Qaeda, which could go a long way towards revealing McCain as an unserious and fairly fanatical person. 

The response could go something like this: “The Bush administration prosecuted the war in Iraq incompetently for years, so when the Bush administration proposed sending additional troops to an unnecessary war that has harmed our interests Barack Obama correctly challenged and questioned the wisdom of endorsing yet another plan put forward by a failed President.  John McCain accepted this plan without hesitation, because he has had a record of reflexively calling for the escalation of armed conflicts for the last ten years.  Now the administration is starting to embrace key diplomatic aspects of the Baker-Hamilton Report’s recommendations that Barack Obama endorsed, but which this administration and John McCain rejected at the time.  John McCain offers four years of the same kind of leadership that failed us in Iraq, and our country cannot afford to take that path.”      

Someone might also note that 51% of the public still believes that things are going badly in Iraq as recently as last week.  For it to make any sense, running on the “surge” has to take for granted that a majority accepts that things are going reasonably well.  If a majority still holds that things are going badly even after the “surge,” which has now ended, how does this really help the pro-“surge” candidate?  Wouldn’t the perception that things are going badly despite the “surge” inspire a view that it is futile to remain in Iraq any longer? 

In the official McCain campaign response, it says, “We would not be in the position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama’s views had prevailed.”  That’s true–had Obama’s stated views prevailed last year, our forces would have already been withdrawn from Iraq for four months by now.  If someone were thinking over at McCain HQ, they would realise that they are obsessed with reminding voters that McCain has supported perpetuating the war in Iraq for the last year and a half when it theoretically could already have been over. 

Third Update: Via The Caucus comes word that Maliki’s team is rapidly backtracking and claiming that Maliki did not say what everyone thinks that he said.  If so, that would make it the second time in the last two weeks that Maliki has more or less endorsed the idea of a timetable for withdrawal and then explained that he has been completely misunderstood or misquoted.  The first quoted statement was one put out by his office and taken from remarks he gave in the UAE, but this second one was made directly by Maliki to a German magazine that should be able to confirm what Maliki actually said.  This will give some comfort to the McCain campaign, since it definitely weakens whatever impact the earlier statements would have had.

Rod and Mark Shea have good posts on P.Z. Myers, whose spiritual insanity I had not been inclined to discuss earlier, since it seems that notoriety and attention are what atheist “propagandists of the act” seem to crave most of all.  However, there was something in both posts that I noticed that I thought deserved a few words of comment.  This concerns the use of the word evangelical in describing militant, aggressive atheists of Myers’ sort.   

Shea:

C.S. Lewis describes the curious evangelical itch [bold mine-DL] that rankles in the shriveled soul of the God-hater in his Great Divorce.

I know what Rod, Shea (and Lewis) mean, and I don’t want to be pedantic, but it struck me that crediting atheists with an “evangelical” impulse misrepresents what compels them and it also unintentionally bestows on their message a value that Christians do not believe it possesses.  This is not news to either of them or most anyone else, but since something evangelical properly pertains to good news and specifically to the Good News of the Gospel, it is not really fitting to attribute an evangelical impulse to proselytes of godlessness.  We often refer to proselytism of various kinds, both ideological and religious, as evangelism, and today we may refer to episodes from marketing and politics as “spreading the Gospel of such-and-such,” but I think we would find it strange to use the word evangelical to describe Wahhabi proselytes. 

With a nod to Dostoevsky, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that there is something especially demonic in this particularly aggressive sort of atheism.  If what Myers has done (or claimed to have done) is evil, as Shea rightly notes, his desire to spread word of his evil-doing would have to be called ponerangelism.

Here is an adaptation of the same song seen here in the older film Laila-Majnu.

Yet he [Reihan] also seems to sense that they don’t really coincide, which leaves him in a position where he will neither endorse nor reject the nationalist assumptions of GNP. But either you’re morally in favor of a more cosmopolitan political order or you’re against it. ~Will Wilkinson

This is an unusually strange objection to make against Reihan, who has made very clear that he is a certain kind of nationalist and who agrees with Wilkinson that nationalism and patriotism are extremely closely related (I dissented from this here). 

P.S.  By the way, I’m morally against a “more cosmopolitan political order” as it is meant here.