The Obama Moonwalk

Looking like Michael Jackson doing the 'moonwalk', Senator Obama hit reverse and backtracked this week on his incendiary verbal foray into the subject of how much longer in Iraq. The suggestion on Monday by Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who faces upcoming parliamentary elections in Iraq, that a withdrawal time line be part of any status of forces agreement must have made it perfectly clear to Senator Obama that staying in Iraq indefinitely is not politically possible. A recent dip in his poll numbers after his waffling on the subject probably also clarified his thinking, if not his choreography. A forthcoming Pentagon lengthy document (number of pages unknown at this point) proposes a force level of 50,000 by 2009 according to Newsweek. It seems official Washington is reluctantly coalescing on withdrawal mode. The Senator wrote this week in the New York Times that the occupation is a costly distraction causing a myopic focus on tactics inside Iraq with little attention to a regional strategy, and recommitted himself to a phased withdrawal of all combat troops within 16 months after taking office. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the recrudescent Taliban stunned NATO forces with a coordinated attack in numbers on an isolated, unfinished outpost temporarily breaching the position and inflicting a 50% casualty rate on US defenders. It was the first time insurgent fighters successfully attacked any of the three dozen joint Afghan-NATO positions. Currently there are only 32,000 American troops there.