John McCain admits he was taken by surprise by some of recent events in Iraq as reported by the New York Times:

Mr. McCain said he had not expected Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to try to oust Shiite militias from Basra without consulting the Americans, and that he was troubled by some of the demands that were made by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr as part of his offer of a ceasefire after the militias held off the American-supported assault. And he tied some of the current problems to the Bush administration's old strategy there.

"Maliki decided to take on this operation without consulting the Americans,'' Mr. McCain said on his campaign bus as it rolled through downtown Meridian, saying that the move showed independence but that he had expected the military to focus on Mosul.

"I just am surprised that he would take it on himself to go down and take charge of a military offensive,'' he said. "I had not anticipated that he would do that.''

McCain then went on to implicate the original invasion plan for creating the situation that we now see on the ground in southern Iraq:

"This goes back to when we didn't have enough boots on the ground, after the initial military success,'' he said. "Iranian clerics moved into the region, Iranian influence moved into southern Iraq, and we basically, and the British, did not do a great deal to prevent them. These are the penalties we continue to pay for the very bad mishandling of the war for nearly four years while they became solidly entrenched."

McCain might want to be more careful about implicating our British allies for the current situation, but overall his forthrightness on the recent events is a refreshing departure from President Bush's unrealistically optimistic portrayals of Iraq. McCain appears far less scripted than Bush and seems much more willing to tell the American people what he and his foreign policy advisers think about the situation. The president on the other hand, explains the current fighting as a "very positive moment" and simply leaves it at that. McCain's approach will surely work better with a country that has grown weary of what appears to be an endless war in Iraq.

Ultimately, I believe Iraq is an issue that will do McCain no good one way or the other. If the war in Iraq is going well, it won't be a significant issue in the general election. We can all see how media coverage of the war has dropped dramatically in the last few months as the security situation improved.

On the other hand, if the war is going badly the media coverage will "surge" on its own creating an unavoidable problem for McCain since he is so closely identified with it. McCain's in a tough pickle on Iraq and he is not in control of events there. As it stands now, Nouri al-Maliki will have much more influence on how the issue of Iraq plays in the general election than John McCain himself.