You know, as well as I do, that John McCain wanted to goad Barack Obama into visiting Iraq in hopes of a “Dukakis moment.”

This ain’t it:

And indeed, as the New York Times notes, Obama’s trip couldn’t have been more disastrous for McCain:

The central tenet of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is suddenly aligned with what the Iraqis themselves now increasingly seem to want. Not only have the developments offered Mr. Obama a measure of credibility as a prospective world leader in a week when his every move is receiving intensive attention at home and abroad, but it has complicated Mr. McCain’s leading argument against him: that a withdrawal timeline would be tantamount to surrender and would leave Iraqis in dangerous straits.

Comments Matt Y.:

Still, I’m not sure even Oppel & Zeleny quite grasp the scope of McCain’s debacle here. He’d spent, several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the “progress” in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality.

But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he’d been right all along! That’s about as close to “game, set, match” as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign.

Neither McCain nor the hawks in general can afford to concede anything, of course, and continue to hammer away at the periphery, continuing to pretend that Obama is somehow locked into a specific time frame - when in fact that’s not the case.

One gets the feeling that McCain still wants to hold out for some unabiguous “victory” - perhaps complete with ticker-tape parade or some such. Whereas Obama is now in the position of saying: We did what we came to do, this country belongs to the Iraqis, if they believe it’s time for us to go then it is indeed time to leave. The “danger,” of course, is that this leaves Iraq to the Iraqis, and who knows what they will do. Make common cause with Iran, perhaps? But then, we’re not completely leaving; there will remain a smaller American force in the country, and the biggest embassy compound the world has ever seen will continue to bustle with U.S. activity.

But unless the goal all along has been naked imperialism, we were always going to have to leave Iraq to the Iraqis, to govern as they see fit; to defend themselves against internal or external threats. And again, the right now finds itself forced to argue that we know better than the Iraqis what’s best for their country; or that what’s best for our country involves ignoring what Iraqis themselves want - and that’s imperalism, however you slice it.

The wheels have come off the right’s central argument about Iraq, in other words. Which makes it fitting that as Obama was talking with Gen. Petraeus, McCain was also being photographed:

So who’s Dukakis now?