Iraq deadline? 100 years? What are you talking about?

Remember the vigor with which President Bush objected to the notion of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq?

And then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said in an interview with Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, that, yes, he would like some timetables, and how did something like the one proposed by Sen. Barack Obama sound?

And how Bush finally agreed, in a secure video conference with Maliki a month ago, to what the White House is now calling "aspirational timelines" and "aspirational time horizons?"

And against all that, how Sen. John McCain seemed to be out on a limb for having responded to a questioner in January that U.S. troops could spend "maybe 100" years in Iraq "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed?"

(To be fair: He threw out the number not as a statement of how long combat troops would be fighting, but as a comparison he explained later to the on-going role that U.S. troops have played for more than 50 years in peaceful South Korea, Germany and Japan).

If you are trying to figure out the state of play on what is a central foreign policy question facing the United States -- and thus central in the presidential campaign -- it got a little clearer Thursday.

And then a White House spokesman tried to walk it all back today.

On Thursday in Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials drew close to a draft agreement to see U.S. forces conditionally withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Maliki and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played down the idea that an agreement was imminent. Still, one could be forgiven for thinking that what the officials were talking about sounded like a deadline for the troop deployment to end.

Not so, suggested Deputy White House Press Secretary Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Speaking with reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending a late-summer holiday, Johndroe insisted that whatever talks were taking place with the Iraqis, they were about "aspirational timelines" and "goals for more troops to come home."

But not deadlines.

He wasn't asked whether the "aspirational time horizons" extended 100 years.

-- James Gerstenzang

Photo: President Bush and, on screen, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in a secure video conference in 2006. Credit: Kimberlee Hewitt / White House