During the presidential ­campaign, John McCain, argued that imposing a ­deadline to remove combat troops from Iraq was tantamount to accepting defeat in the country. It is a measure of how much has changed over the past six months that he is now one of the chief cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq by August 2010.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Mr McCain spent most of last year lambasting his White House rival for planning to “cut and run” from Iraq, even claiming that Mr Obama would “rather lose a war than lose a campaign”.