I read the two. Obama wins hands down - his essay is very well written from a technical standpoint. Basically, he wants to help Maliki pull the U.S. combat forces out of Iraq and let the Iraqi armed forces take over, something I have long been waiting for in this war. He also offers to redeploy troops in Afghanistan while keeping a small residual force in Iraq, so we won't be completely pulling out of there, but instead continuing to help the Iraqis while concentrating on other matters elsewhere, all by 2010. It's not a complete pullout, but Obama wants to make sure this whole Iraq thing is put to bed. I like the plan - just in case something goes wrong, we'll still be there to help, and it will be helpful with U.S.-Iraq relations after long, long years of continual fuckups.

McCain's article basically sounds like one of his speeches: Dull, behind the curve, deceitful, not to mention he shovels the same old histrionic 'Hooray America' crap we've been hearing from the White House for the last few years. He still clings onto the ridiculous "withdrawal = surrender" logic and decides that by the end of his first term in 2013, most of our combat troops will be pulled out of Iraq to go fight other wars, which is completely unacceptable given how the situation in Afghanistan is starting to deteriorate. He even takes the opportunity to attack Obama on the surge by taking quotes out of context and boils down his own argument to "we must not pull out of Iraq for domestic political reasons, rather a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground".

I did find something very interesting in McCain's essay, though: That unnamed source that McCain quotes at the beginning of his essay (The quote that begins 'Iraq has met all but three of the benchmarks...') is an article from the Washington Post that apparently no one else bothered running (according to Google, I could be wrong about this): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR 2008070102860.html

But anyway: Obama's plan sounds like a very good first step to getting Maliki to take some responsibility, and McCain advocates staying in Iraq so the U.S. can drag their feet for four more years. I know who which op-ed I like.

Oh, yeah, and five stars for the video because that is 'Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran' levels of sad.

Pretty much how both myself and the editor of the Times felt.
However, I had to scratch my head intensely on the Three Benchmarks Left quote. Was McCain right? He must be, since he's war hero, I mean it would be completely baseless and evil of him to blatantly lie like that. But I swore it was the other way around, that we had only accomplished three benchmarks... However, that was last year, and this year we have actually succeeded in 15 of the 18 benchmarks posed by the Democrats and the Bush Admin.

But, what are the three remaining benchmarks? They're a doozie:

�Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress -- enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenue�

That is sort of the crux of the fucking problem, is it not McCain? Since we are paying militias to not kill each other anymore, isn't that sort of like paying Saddam Hussein to not kill people? Isn't that sort of the fundamental doctrine we've been trying to get away from with this whole preemptive strike bullshit? The oil, and who gets it when it starts really flowing, is at the center of who controls Iraq. If we want the oil and we don't want another terrorist machine like the House of Saud taking over, then we have to stay there forever. Conservatives are simply unwilling to admit any complexities of this war. They are unwilling to face up to the underhanded methods they've used to achieve these ridiculously transparent benchmarks.

He said he "knows how to win wars"

I'm not sure how being a prisoner in a losing war imparts you with the knowledge of how to win them