The Iraqi Prime Minister May Have Been Born A Muslim

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri Al-Maliki, endorses Barack Obama's withdrawal plan for Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Of course, one of the big flaws in the Republican fetishization of "the facts on the ground" (read: the cobbled-together occurrences and out-of-context events that make up the continued rationale to keep fighting onwards towards Victory 18 of 26 in the war) is that, quite often, the facts on the ground reflect an Iraqi political and military landscape that, to an extent, mirrors ours. There are always going to be downsides to any plan in Iraq, if for no other reason than that the continued building on a flawed foundation simply guarantees a flawed building. What we have to take from this is that it's generally smarter to stop building than it is to continually (and expensively) compensate for the thousands of mistakes that were made during the process.