Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama and the Iraqi government found agreement in Baghdad on Monday for a 2010 withdrawal of US combat forces, a timeline that has faced withering criticism from Republican Sen. John McCain. As Obama laid eyes on the Iraq war for the first time in more than two years, he emerged from a meeting with Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, calling it “very constructive.” The trip follows Republican attempts to diminish Obama's foreign policy experience and a challenge from McCain, who complained that Obama was wrong to plan for troop withdrawal without having visited since January 2006. McCain has visited Iraq eight times since the war began. The Arizona senator has said Obama's foreign policy plans are naive and that he is untested. After Obama sat down with Al-Maliki in Baghdad's heavily protect Green Zone, government spokesman Ali Al-Dabagh, who is very close to the Iraqi leader and sat in on the meeting, said Baghdad was not interested in troop withdrawal plans that arise out of the American presidential campaign but “in a real timetable the Iraqis have set.” When asked for a date, Al-Dabagh said, “up to 2010.” That would match Obama's pledge to remove US combat troops within 16 months of taking office and reinforces Al-Maliki's reported support for that timetable in an interview published last week in Der Spiegel, a German magazine. McCain contends American forces have turned the corner in Iraq after Gen. David Petraeus took charge of an additional 30,000 troops last year and revamped military strategy. McCain opposes setting a timetable for troop withdrawals and chided Obama's Iraq strategy yet again in a television interview Monday. “This is the same strategy that he voted against, railed against. He was wrong about the surge. It is succeeding, and we are winning,” McCain said in an ABC interview.
