And that’s the mark of a sensible policymaker. For the United States., victory is a category error in a war like Iraq. The goal is to mitigate the fundamental errors of invasion and occupation by leaving the country in the hands of a reasonably capable Iraqi government. If there is a victory to be had, it’s to be had by that government, when it finds a way to either defeat, co-opt or marginalize the rejectionists challenging its authority.

Or maybe another way. According to The New York Times, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is portraying the June 30 departure of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi towns and cities as a “great victory,” ahead of the forthcoming national elections. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, contended to Maliki that the prime minister should allow a limited U.S. combat presence in violent northern cities like Mosul. Maliki rejected the argument. His efforts are designed to cast himself as the man who ended the occupation of Iraq, in line with his years-long strategy of consolidating power within his office.

“We will not ask them to intervene in combat operations related to maintaining public order,” he said in an interview with Le Monde published last week. “It is finished.”

Sure, as of next week, 130,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq as an insurance policy, training and equipping the Iraqi security forces for missions like emergency medical evacuation, and with their helicopters flying in the skies for if things get gnarly. But that’s less important than the political dynamic that Maliki’s strategy reinforces, which is that there’s a dividend to be reaped by the leader who evicts the United States from Iraq. And while that may hurt American feelings, it gets the U.S. everything its interests require: out of Iraq, while a reliable-enough U.S. ally increases his hold on power. As a mitigation strategy, it works fairly well. Unsurprisingly, U.S. military leaders embrace it. Here’s military spokesman Stephen Lanza, a one-star general:

“Symbolically,” General Lanza said of the withdrawing American forces ahead of Tuesday, “this is what we want for the Iraqis as a sovereign nation.”

First, the context. The Kurds have oil reserves inside the Kurdistan Regional Government that, by some estimates, rival Nigeria’s. Naturally, they claim the right to that oil — it’s under their land, after all — as a natural resource that will bankroll a viable independent Kurdistan one day. Losing that oil will be a disaster for Iraqi Arabs. While Iraq has been preoccupied by occupation and insurgency, the Kurds have moved forward with the development of the oil fields, inking deals with wildcatting oil companies at very favorable prices. The catch is that it’s been unclear what happens to that oil, since the Iraqi government has reserved the exclusive right to the fields that contain it.

The details of the deal are unclear, The Times reports, but here’s what appears to be the substance of it:

Under the terms, the Kurds can begin exporting about 60,000 barrels of oil a day from the Tawke field starting on June 1, and an additional 40,000 barrels a day from a second field, Taq-Taq, later in the month. The oil will be marketed by the central government and all revenue will go to Baghdad, said Asim Jihad, chief spokesman of the Oil Ministry.

Sending “all revenue” to Baghdad, with the central government “market[ing]” the oil makes it unclear what the Kurds actually get out of this deal, as The Times notes. One answer: the Kurds want the Baghdad government to simply recognize their claim to the oil. Once that happens, the Kurds can drive a harder bargain in the ongoing negotiations over the hydrocarbon law, which will supposedly delineate how Iraq’s various ethnic and sectarian and regional interests will each benefit (or lose out) from the nation’s oil bounty. And there’s an additional issue at stake: now that Iraqi Arabs are recognizing Kurdish oil claims, the Kurds have more incentive to expand the territory they control, into oil-rich disputed regions under Baghdad’s control, like Kirkuk, that they’ve long claimed.

More as soon as the terms of the deal become clearer.

“These dates cannot be extended, and this is consistent with the transfer and handover of responsibility to Iraqi security forces,” Dabbagh said in a statement.

Iraqi government statements are occasionally walked back, so let’s wait and see if this one is. But the fact that Dabbagh put out a statement shooting down Gen. Raymond Odierno’s trial balloon indicates that Maliki thinks that extending the deadlines would provoke more chaos than allowing U.S. forces more time to conduct combat operations would suppress.

[Iraqi Major] General [Muhammed] Askari emphatically said that the June 30 provision did not apply to the Camp Victory complex because it was effectively outside the city. General Askari also said having American combat troops at Camp Prosperity would not violate the terms of the agreement, because they are there for force protection and to guard the nearby embassy.

“If there is a small group to stay in that camp to guard the American Embassy, that’s no problem,” he said. “The meaning of the SOFA is that their vehicles cannot go in the streets of Baghdad and interfere with our job.”

I’ve been to the Victory complex, which is five bases in one — what a bargain! — surrounding Baghdad International Airport. It’s huge. Like, 20,000 soldiers-housed-huge. So huge that there’s a transit system of minibuses that take you around in it. So huge that I got lost on one of the minibuses and a soldier I believe was from Uganda angrily demanded my papers when it was clear to him that I was not where I was supposed to be. Anyway. The point is that while it’s true that Victory is on the outskirts of the city, no one ever referred to it to me as being “outside” of Baghdad.” All our discussions were about what was going on “here in Baghdad” and so forth. Two things, I think, can be safely presumed by the Iraqi military’s determination that Victory is outside Baghdad: first, that moving all those troops and their supplies out of Victory because of the SOFA is a huge logistical hassle that no one wants; and second, that the Iraqi military wants an insurance policy, as provided for in the SOFA, to call on U.S. troops before 2010 in case security worsens in the city.

As for Mosul, the Times piece indicates that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hasn’t yet made a decision about keeping U.S. combat forces in the city. Any such decision comes at an inconvenient moment, as Maliki said over the weekend that the U.S. violated the SOFA during a raid in the southern city of Kut that left Iraqi civilians dead. (The U.S. military disputes that characterization, saying the operation was “fully coordinated and approved by the Iraqi government.”) Juan Cole provides context:

Al-Maliki is touchy about such an operation in Kut and probably wants personal approval in such matters. Kut is in the Shiite south, where al-Maliki has been attempting to spread the influence of his Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa). It has a significant Sadrist constituency, and al-Maliki is trying to put together coalition provincial governments with the Sadrists. So the US raid made al-Maliki look weak and puppet-like and made him unpopular in a key area where he wants support.

Assuming Cole’s read is correct, none of those conditions apply in Mosul, so perhaps Maliki will approve the U.S. request to keep combat troops in the city after June 30.

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Q Hi, sir. This is Daphne Benoit with Agence France-Presse. Given the recent acts of violence in the Mosul region, are you still confident that you’re going to be able to leave the city by end of June as planned? And are you concerned it might actually worsen the situation?

COL. VOLESKY: The 30 June date that’s — that’s out there, we are conducting an assessment right now with our Iraqi counterparts to determine what the way ahead is for security in Mosul.

And based on that assessment, a decision will be made what we will do on 30 June. If the Iraqi government believes we should stay in Mosul to continue the security progress, we’ll support our Iraqi counterparts past 30 June and continue to build on the momentum that we’ve got here. If we’re — if the decisions made that we leave, then we’ll go into the Nineveh province at large and continue supporting Iraqi security forces.

But again that, in my assessment, will all be made based on the combined assessment that is currently being collected right now.

I wasn’t at this briefing, so I can’t speak to its nuances. But it’s a little hard to believe that Volesky and Odierno would float the possibility of staying in Mosul past June 30 — the deadline set by the Status of Forces Agreement for U.S. combat forces to vacate Iraqi cities — unless (a) the decision’s already been made, or (b) they’re trying to publicly pressure the Iraqis into acquiescing. I have no information here, and my speculation could be off. But the line on Mosul is starting to get conspicuous. Now, furthermore, maybe staying in Mosul past June 30 is the right thing, security-wise. I’ve had a weird sentimental attachment to much-suffering Mosul since visiting in March 2007. But it’s also right and good and wise to respect the withdrawal dates that the U.S. and Iraqi governments negotiated.

First of all is to achieve true national reconciliation that allows all those displaced to return to the city, and I believe that our city is able to absorb all the displaced. From there we would launch a strategic and objective development program. We would like all the citizens in the governorate to participate in this development program, and we have an ambitious economic program for the governorate.

I stress that we must depart from several disputed issues between the Kurdistan Region’s government and the government in Baghdad, and that we want to work with our Kurdish brothers as well as all the other ethnicities on grounds that we are all citizens of the governorate, and away from any foreign agendas.

With the voting still being tallied in this weekend’s provincial elections, this remains a time of upheaval in Iraq: new Sunni power blocs coalescing in disputed territories in the northern provinces of Ninewah and Tammim/Kirkuk herald friction with the Kurds, who want to annex part of those provinces to their autonomous area, that has long threatened to escalate. As The Post’s Glenn Kessler writes, Hill has deep experience dealing with intransigent negotiating partners — the North Koreans, former Vice President Dick Cheney — and his persistence in part resulted in Pyongyang taking significant steps toward nuclear disarmament.

Hill doesn’t have experience in the Arab world, though, and doesn’t speak Arabic. My understanding is that the Obama team wanted someone who was a career diplomat — but Hill wasn’t its first choice. An inability to nail down a candidate for the position, as well as the Afghanistan envoy, prevented President Obama from rolling out both new ambassadors during his Jan. 22 visit to the State Department, when both George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke were unveiled as Mideast and South Asian envoys, respectively.

What’s more, some longtime Iraq hands have expressed frustration that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad seems overeager to act like a “normal” embassy — establishing bilateral political and economic ties — when Iraq still has 140,000 U.S. troops on its territory; violence continues, albeit “only” at 2004 levels; and its entire political structure is in flux. Hill will have a lot on his plate, and it’ll be interesting to hear how he conceives of the requirements of his job during his confirmation hearings.

Naturally I saw no evidence of torture during my brief in-processing, after which I went on to Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost Province, near the Pakistan border. I did see a lot of transit, however.

Bagram is enormous. A public-affairs officer told me that it houses 12,000 U.S. and allied troops, along with another 6,000 or so contractors. In contrast to the surrounding areas under Afghan government control, Bagram is clean, well-paved, bustling and attentive to its residents’ needs. There’s a small mall called a PX, familiar to any denizen of U.S. military bases, where crummy Afghan or Afghan-esque trinkets are available for purchase, right next to a Dairy Queen, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut and a Green Beans coffee shops.

If you’ll permit me a digression, the only places I’ve ever seen Green Beans cafes have been military bases in Kuwait, Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul, and now Bagram. If they exist in civilian life I’ve never seen them. Neither had the public-affairs officer. There’s also an Orange Julius smoothie stand — which I haven’t seen since the Kings Plaza Mall in Brooklyn shuttered its franchise when I was eight years old. Odd that I should find one halfway around the world, 20 years later.

Indeed, it’s alarmingly easy to walk Bagram’s Disney Drive – named for an Army Specialist killed in action – and forget this is Afghanistan. It takes a glance over to the silhouette of the jagged mountains cradling the base to remember where you are.

The traveling press is lodged in an air-conditioned bunk called Hotel California, where the placards detailing the hotel rules have references to Eagles lyrics. (“There is no alcohol on base. ‘No pink champagne on ice.’”) The bunk beds have wood frames and spring-coiled mattresses — a significant upgrade from the cots at Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Liberty or Mosul’s Forward Operating Base Marez.

Around the base is evidence of an actual coalition. That’s not just because battle uniforms contain the ISAF patch indicating the NATO command here. It’s because there are actual foreign troops. Much of the chatter I heard on the way to the chow hall was in Polish, and I ate dinner next to a Polish helicopter pilot. A wrong turn as I tried to get back to Hotel California bumped me into a detachment of hungry Egyptian soldiers.

In Baghdad last year, most of the foreigners I encountered worked for contractors like KBR, and at Mosul Airport I met a bunch of surly Albanian troops. And they were leaving.