I believe we’re at one of those moments when it is a help to step back from the rhetorical flurry and see where each side stands — call it clearing away the Fog of Spin.

The Iraq war is very unpopular. The majority of the country believes it was a mistake to have invaded in the first place. And the great majority wants to get all of our troops out of Iraq in the near future. These are facts amply supported by what is now years of public opinion data. While it is true that the reduction in violence over the last eight to nine months has led to some shift in how people think “things are going” in Iraq, it has had no measurable effect on the key questions: Should we be there in the first place? (no) and Should we leave now? (yes).

This is the only backdrop against which to understand the current jousting over the semantics of the Iraq debate.

We have two candidates with starkly different positions. Barack Obama is for an orderly and considered withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces in Iraq, a process he says he will begin immediately upon taking office.

John McCain supports a permanent garrisoning of U.S. troops on military bases in Iraq — a long-term “presence” that he hopes will require a constantly diminishing amount of actual combat and thus an ever-diminishing toll in American lives.

This is, I believe, a fair and even generous description of each candidate’s essential position. And the recital makes the key point clear: McCain’s position is squarely on the wrong side of public opinion — in fact, to an overwhelming degree.

This is why the McCain campaign spends what seems almost literally to be all its time (with tractable reporters in tow) scrutinizing the rhetorical entrails of Obama’s every statement, trying to find some movement or contradiction — or, frankly, anything — that can be talked about to keep everybody’s attention (press, commentators, citizens, precocious teenagers) off the fact that McCain’s position on Iraq is wildly unpopular — and, even more, what McCain’s position actually is.

Because of this, on Iraq, McCain’s entire campaign is based on a strategy of constant obfuscation — a strategy that has become much more aggressive in the wake of what the McCain campaign is calling last week’s “relaunch” with a new staff based around Rove protégés from President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Now let me say a few words more about the nature of this dodge. As noted Wednesday, despite the AP’s sloppy reporting, Obama has been quite consistent on proposing a 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. But let’s back up and come at the question another way. If 16 months is no good, is there anyone out there ideologically committed to 12 or 20 months? Or for that matter, since few of us in the general population have a good understanding of the operational details of how you withdraw well over 100,000 military personnel from a country like Iraq, why is it not enough for a presidential candidate simply to say, “I’ll change the policy on the day I get into office. And that means I’m going to begin an orderly and considered withdrawal of our troops and have it done as soon as possible”?

Most people who support withdrawal would likely say, “No, we need specifics, a timetable, a date certain, because we’ve been hearing this for years — that we’ll be out as soon as we can, as soon as this, that or the other happens.”

And I’d agree.

But this makes the point. Most people who are so keyed into specifics and hard deadlines are that way because we’ve had five years of a policy of deliberate deception in which vague promises of bringing the troops home in the pretty near future are hung out in front of the public’s collective nose as a means of obscuring the real policy of keeping American troops in Iraq on a permanent basis. In this respect, McCain is just offering more of the same.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com . His column appears in The Hill each week.
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