The Look of Leadership

Keith R. Schmitz

Maybe John McCain wishes he could take back his goading of Barack Obama to go to Iraq.

The Illinois Senator is making his way through the world leaders this week, with a lot of press focus on the trip. He could screw up but the odds are not in favor of a miss-step.

In the meantime we have the White House reconfiguring "withdraw" and "time-line" to read "time-horizon." No matter how you slice it, this is means our troops leaving Iraq. In the meantime McCain stutters and stammers that we can't think about dates.

I'm not too confident though that a Republican administration would follow through on a departure. After all, there are those oil contracts to protect, and with the prospect that a Democratic administration could mean a lot of perp-walking for members of the Bush Administration the strategy for the GOP I'll be is promise them anything, but give them the screw.

Then again, McCain is talking redeployment of US troops from Iraq to the unraveling Afghanistan effort -- just as Obama has advocated previously. I'm not wild about the prospects of spending people and money in that country because of what Afghanistan did to Britain over a hundred years ago and the USSR more recently. As much as Reagan worshippers keep droning on about how the Gipper drank the Ruskies under the table, it appears Charlie Wilson's war and the Afghan fighters drained the Evil Empire.

For someone who is being portrayed as a rookie senator, more and more it looks like judgement rather than so-called experience is defining leadership.