I get to talk to John Amato multiple times a day, but it's easy for me to forget no matter how familiar and frequent that voice is in my ear, most other C&Lers don't know what John looks or sounds like. But luckily for all you curious C&Lers out there, Jason Linkins, HuffPo's roving reporter at the DNC, caught up with John in Denver and asked him his take on Maliki's insistence that the newly negotiated withdrawal of US troops from Iraq is a "real" withdrawal:

Iraq and the United States have agreed that all U.S. troops will leave by the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday, but Washington said no final deal had been reached.

"There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said in a speech to tribal leaders in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

"An open time limit is not acceptable in any security deal that governs the presence of the international forces," he said.

Maliki's remarks were the most explicit statement yet that the increasingly assertive Iraqi government expects the U.S. presence to end in three years as part of a deal between Washington and Baghdad to allow them to stay beyond this year.

I wrote this yesterday, but deleted it by accident. I still love this:

(Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're f*&ked."

I figured BushCo would go after Maliki after he basically signed on to Obama's Iraq position.

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”[..] And “The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t,” Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Marc Ambinder writes

This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? to argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing. Obviously, our national interests aren't equivalent to Iraq's, but... Malik isn't listening to the generals on the ground...but the "hasn't been to Iraq" line doesn't work here.

Soon after, Maliki tried to clarify---errr---or verify his remarks. I bet the video conference machine was pretty busy over the weekend. So we get the Maliki Walkback, sort of...But Spiegel stands by its comments...

Obama is pleased, but McCain certainly is not. In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed support for Obama's troop withdrawal plans. Despite a half-hearted retraction, the comments have stirred up the US presidential campaign. SPIEGEL stands by its version of the conversation.

And they are still similar positions with Obama:

Iraq's government spokesman is hopeful that U.S. combat forces could be out of the country by 2010. Ali al-Dabbagh made the comments following a meeting in Baghdad on Monday between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day.

But how were they translated? McCain can say he's winning and we won and all that...Then why aren't we leaving? Well they say "Iraq is fragile." Huh? So McCain says we won, but we can't leave because it's fragile. Will it be fragile for 100 years?

Feministe: The journalistic establishment is supposed to be a check on government, not a BUSHCO echo chamber.

Newshoggers: Sadr gives Maliki a 24 hour ultimatum on the ceasefire

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Audacity of Pope

Comments from Left Field: We're supposed to believe that World Nut Daily has exclusive daily access to Hamas and that Hamas likes Obama...uh...OK.

Econbrowser: Shouldn't the rapidly rising price of food be a campaign issue?

The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat: Instead of moving from left to right and getting dumber, Kevin Phillips moved from right to left -- and his books got even more valuable. Let Phillips show you how America became a land of bad debt and worse religion, while Haifa Zangana shows you how Baghdad became a city of widows and Lynn Hunt explains how fiction set the stage for human rights.

To describe the ongoing Blackwater scandal as a fiasco would be a dramatic understatement. Not only do we have a situation in which private security contractors stand accused of killing Iraqi civilians without provocation, we also have deep divisions brewing between the Pentagon and the State Department, coupled by State stonewalling a congressional investigation.

A confrontation between the U.S. military and the State Department is unfolding over the involvement of Blackwater USA in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square Sept. 16, bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions between the military and private security companies in Iraq, according to U.S. military and government officials. [...]

“This is a nightmare,” said a senior U.S. military official. “We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we’re trying to have an impact for the long term.”

At this point, the State Department seems to be treating Blackwater contractors as the agency’s own private army, accountable to no one outside the department. The Maliki government believes Blackwater is a criminal enterprise, the Iraqi people resent Blackwater’s presence, the Pentagon believes Blackwater is lying about the Sept. 16 incident in Nisoor Square, and congressional Democrats have questions about what has transpired — which the State Department refuses to answer.

This is a debacle so severe and humiliating, only the Bush administration could pull it off.

David Kurtz offers this helpful timeline of events that sets the stage for where we are now.

Conservative heads continue to explode over the rescheduled GOP CNN/YouTube debate. One conservative's predictable solution to managing the direct participation of American voters? Let right-wing bloggers choose the questions.

Meanwhile, the 2008 GOP presidential field offers Americans a unified theory of Islamic terrorism which dangerously conflates all enemies, real or imagined. Of course, Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee et al are merely plagiarizing from the master.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki is at loggerheads with General Petraeus for arming Sunni militants backed by Saudi Arabia, now the proposed recipient of a massive new U.S. arms package. And that was just Sunday.

Back in DC, data mining may be at the center of Alberto Gonzales' latest prevarications over illegal NSA domestic surveillance. While the National Review debates itself over his controlling legal authority, Fox News can't find any takers to defend Gonzo.

An evangelical civil war has broken out over creating a Palestinian state and fast-tracking the End of Days. And while Joe Lieberman compares Pastor John Hagee to Moses, Robert Novak dreams of an afterlife without bloggers.

And as a shaky Wall Street seeks to rebound from last week's disaster, Brad Delong and Mark Thoma offer David Brooks an economics lesson.

Guest blogging the Round Up this week is Jon Perr from Perrspectives. Send your links, recommendations, comments and angst to mbr AT perrspectives DOT com.

The Group News Blog:  Why 50,000 pissed-off New Yorkers are dying to stick a shiv in Rudy Giuliani's presidential hopes.

Orcinus:  Be very afraid.  Bill O'Reilly has uncovered a "national underground network" of "pistol-packing pink lesbian" gangs.

David Bacon of TAP on Benchmark #1:  "In Iraq, however, Maliki faces a fact that U.S. policymakers refuse to recognize: The oil industry is a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty and nationalism. Handing control to foreign companies is an extremely unpopular idea."

Truth 2 Power Journal:  Après Scooter, le Déluge!  Criminal defendants, including an alleged Hamas operative, are already demanding "the Libby Treatment."  (Also: will Bush get the Clinton Treatment?)

Rick Perlstein:  "Principled Goldwater conservatism" is just as bad as the cheesy Bush kind.

The ACLU files suit over a "Presidential Advance Manual" explaining how to restrict dissent at taxpayer-funded Presidential events, which leads Drinking Liberally in New Milford to wonder where the White House get its ideas.

Guest blogger Simbaud bids a fond adieu to the C&L community, and to our congenial hosts John, Nicole, and Mike, whose generosity and goodwill we hope to repay when next they visit a distant Northern land.  Meanwhile, we are pleased to leave you in the extremely capable hands of our good friend The Heretik, who will be entertaining you in this space for the next week.  Send your very finest links to: joe.ivory.mattingly AT gmail DOT com.

State of the Day: As the U.S. surges, Maliki purges. He seems to be getting the hang of this democracy thing

The Osterley Times: Saudi Arabia backs off from Bush. Y'think Bushites are puzzled as to why any country in the Middle East might be plotting a separate course from their own? These guys are to diplomacy what Rush Limbaugh is to race relations. Their heedless bungling across the region has been monumentally destructive.

NO QUARTER: A letter, written by a group of former intelligence officers, reflects disgust with George Tenet's effort to burnish his image with his new "tell" all book.

Sensen No Sen: A solution to the apparent impasse over re-opening New Orleans public housing - which is, by and large, safe enough for occupancy - remains in limbo. Efforts to provide housing to the poorest and economically weakest residents of New Orleans are not being vigorously pursued by the Louisiana congressional delegation 

The Sideshow: Always has a great roundup...

This American Life is rerunning the 2006 Peabody Award-winning Habeas Schmabeas. This report, about the denial of habeas corpus to terrorism suspects, focuses on the stories of two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and explains why the right is so fundamental in American law.  Go listen...

Tom Brokaw was on Imus the other day and talked about the disastrous Saddam execution. Another monumental blunder under the care of the Bush administration. And there still are way too many right wing ghouls on the Internet. Just ask James Wolcott.

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AJ's take: "Instead, the Bush administration turned over Saddam to the Iraqi government prematurely . . . to a band of thugs-as-executioners . . . who wore not uniforms but leather jackets and ski masks . . . who shouted Shia chants, including invocations of Moqtada al-Sadr . . . all of which was illicitly ideotaped and then emailed around Iraq and throughout the world . . . on, no less, one of the holiest days of the Sunni religious calendar."

Nico supplies the transcript:

BROKAW: I honestly don’t know either. But Saddam Hussein who had disappeared, in effect, as some kind of a symbol over there, suddenly becomes a martyr. He was a terrible tyrant who was responsible for an untold number of deaths, you know, waged his own jihad against the Shiite in that country, especially in the south following Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and now he’s able to stand up there with the hood off and invoke prayer and even invoke the Palestinians, and go out in the eyes of his people at least as a martyr.

IMUS: I mean, it’s difficult to imagine how this could have turned out worse.

BROKAW: No, it is pretty difficult to imagine, and it’s, you know, just as the military commanders and the political people who are trying to run the war think that they’ve got something quieted over in one front, it pops up in another

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He's so distraught over the state of Iraq that Thomas Friedman is losing his mind. He now tells us that Iraq is like thirty civil wars and the only solution would be to reoccupy Iraq again. Wasn't once enough? And we're still occupying Iraq or did we already redeploy our troops?. He wants to go into a time machine and start all over. If we actually---you know had time travel--we wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all! Right Thom? Basically---he's in fantasy land.

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Friedman: ...To have a proper civil war you need to have two sides ----you have about thirty sides---It's beyond a civil war there.

Vieira: So what does that mean in terms of our role there then, Thom?

Friedman: Um, Obviously when you're dealing now with something broken up into so many little pieces--it's hard to believe that anything other than re-occupying the country--um, and establishing the very coherent order we failed to do from the beginning is really the only serious option left.

Vieira (stunned) But, is that really a serious option---to reoccupy the country?

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