McCain announces Iraq withdrawal timetable

With Democrats winning elections even in conservative districts, it's time for the Republicans to reverse their disastrous course. So McCain has taken a bold but necessary first step to end the ongoing disaster in Iraq by declaring victory and announcing a timetable for withdrawal:

In a speech he's about to give shortly at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Ohio, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, will for the first time talk about a specific date for when he envisions direct American military involvement to be over in Iraq.

It's January, 2013. By then, he says, American combat involvement will be over and most U.S. troops back home.

McCain's surprising remarks this morning are an early indicator of a significant shift in the former fighter pilot and POW's stance on the controversial and unpopular war. ...

Maybe you remember during their most heated debate exchange of the Republican primary season, McCain going right after former Gov. Mitt Romney for even hinting at a vague timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals because the Arizona senator alleged it would be taken by the enemy as a sign of surrender and a date they need only await.

Yes, we do remember. But McCain is finally admitting to the inevitable: the Neocon project in Iraq is a dismal failure. Instead of lasting 6 weeks, it's now going on into its sixth year. Instead of paying for itself with stolen Iraqi oil, its spiralling costs are wrecking the US economy. And instead of reconstructing Iraq into a model of democracy, the war has delivered the region into the hands of the Iranians.

But will McCain's actions save face for the once swaggering, now stumbling Republican party? I doubt it. Much damage has been done to American prestige. American resources, both human and economic, have been squandered -- and the damage is far from over. McCain knows this. He will continue to play Nixon and try to back away from a bloodletting while pretending to have won it, but the public isn't going to buy it anymore. Despite Obama's many negatives, his antiwar rhetoric alone might win him the election.

Meanwhile, Clio draws a dark line through the name of yet another empire mortally wounded by imperial overstretch.