Times Tables

Judging from the Bush-McCain crew's pathetically desperate avoidance of the word "timetable" -- the "straight-talker" tacks incoherently from ridicule, to acceptance, and back to denial, while the lame duck feels safe beached on a "general time horizon" -- one could be excused for assuming that the entirety of the debate on the Iraq war is being squeezed to fit within the pages of a day planner. The word "timetable," of course, is a stand-in for the diametrically opposed Iraq policies of the two candidates, but this word -- its mildness, the notion that represents a switch that can simply be turned on or off -- does not begin to capture the width of the gulf separating Obama and McCain's philosophies regarding the war.

Calling for a timetable is not just a rhetorical tool. It is not simply a box to be checked on a candidate's platform, now that it is clear -- if it were not obvious to all but the most obstinately near-sighted before -- that Iraqi leaders and people want us to leave. Merely uttering the word should not be allowed to become a plaything of political expediency, to be granted extra legitimacy with Maliki's explicit use of the term.

The debate over the Iraq war is not about "timetables;" what is at stake is the potential to end the most disastrous imperial misadventure in recent history, to save thousands of American and Iraqi lives, to deprive would-be terrorists of their most celebrated cause , to begin to rebuild America's strained ties with the rest of the world, and to signal a new way of conducting foreign policy, one that does not arrogantly ignore analysis, diplomacy, and popular opinion.

This is far too much to fit on a timetable.