WaPo Columnist:

"...So Obama needs to start thinking about how he will actually implement his vision and better understand the military mindset and the realities for a uniformed leadership that now has its own stake in succeeding in Iraq. Obama needs to redefine the American mission and decouple what Americans should do in Iraq with what America must do against terrorism -- and he needs to embrace the surge.

McCain? Haunted by Vietnam, he raises the specter of al Qaeda "taking" Iraq. A few hundred or thousand terrorists that the U.S. military itself says are practically defeated in the country? McCain is stuck in a false conception -- and an irresponsible scare tactic -- that an attack at home will certainly come if we back off one inch from Baghdad.

McCain pledges to keep U.S. forces in Iraq, and favors adding more troops if necessary. Put aside for a moment the unreality of that plan given how stretched and broken the military itself claims it is. Put aside as well whether McCain hasn't cleverly seized upon the core American dichotomy of hating the Iraq war but hating defeat even more.

The McCain fallacy on Iraq is the suggestion -- his belief -- that old-style, pre-surge "victory" is still possible. Because the Army and Marine Corps are indeed "winning" under the surge, he says it has been successful in changing the political reality in Iraq, and that the non-military needs are now catching up with the military. Here McCain is the naïve one about what the surge was all about and what it has undeniably achieved: Not victory, but change in the terms of the debate to facilitate an honorable American end to the war.
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