What McCain Should Have Done

By Patrick Appel
Abe Greenwald has a point:

At some point, a viable exit is 16 months away....over the past few months, John McCain’s line on withdrawal should have gone something like this: “If at some point, this kind of progress in Iraq makes for genuinely stable circumstance then “timetables” will simply be a non-loaded description of how the U.S. troops come home. But Senator Obama has been proposing arbitrary time-tables for a year-and-a-half now. The important thing is that we’re seeing sea-changes in Iraq and that would not have been the case if Obama’s withdrawal mantra had been heeded.” Instead, by letting the media’s version of his position frame the tone of his rhetoric, John McCain has handed Obama a false victory.