Back on June 25th I posted about the Obama camps waffling on the issue of withdrawal from Iraq. I pointed out that his surrogates seemed to be leaving a huge amount of room available for Obama to move towards the center on the subject.

From June 25th:

Based on this story in the Financial Times ,I believe that Barack Obama will change his mind about withdrawing our troops from Iraq. His decision will be based on one principle. Political expediency. He will "Modify" his plan and mold it in to the most efficient model of assuring the most votes in November.

Apparently he has already started this process:

...Senior advisers to Mr Obama say the campaign is constantly monitoring and debating its response to the situation on the ground in Iraq. But they say that Mr Obama has no plans to modify his timetable for US troop withdrawal. However, Mr Obama and some of his most senior foreign policy advisers have been dropping tantalising hints that there might be a new flexibility over their definition of “withdrawal”...

Read the entire post here.
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Now others seem to agree that Obama WILL change his mind about withdrawing troops form Iraq.

From Jonathan Martin at Politico.

June 30, 2008
Categories: Obama

Tomorrow's Obama flop today?

The next, and perhaps most significant, Obama move to the middle could be on the issue which initially sparked his campaign: Iraq.

Observers from the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol to George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of "The Assassins Gate" can already see it coming:

Said Kristol yesterday on Fox News Sunday:

The next big flip for Obama, and this will make Brit even more astonished, will be on Iraq. He's going to go to Iraq, meet with General Petraeus, decide the surge is working and walk back from his immediate unconditioned withdrawal. And suddenly, it's going to be, "Well, we're going to be very careful, gradual." "Honorable withdrawal," Obama said the other day -- an honorable conclusion to the Iraq war.

And Packer in this week's New Yorker:

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.”

Obama’s advisers have been more forthcoming. Samantha Power, before she resigned from the campaign for making an indiscreet remark about Hillary Clinton, told the BBC, “He will, of course, not rely upon some plan that he’s crafted as a Presidential candidate or a U.S. senator. He will rely upon a plan—an operational plan—that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground.”

And also from the McCain Report we have this story More On the Mother of All Flip-Flops