After what I imagine will be an extensive discussion about the current financial crisis and the back-and-forth in Washington the two candidates will get around to discussing foreign policy tonight. The McCain camp is already showing this snippet suggesting that the final pretense of the netroot-friendly Obama foreign policy (i.e. the surge didn’t really work) is being dropped.

But it is noteworthy that both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post praise the vote in Iraq ( nice that one country has a functioning legislature) to approve elections next year. The Post explains:

For some time, U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker has been citing provincial elections as the most important of Iraq’s “political benchmarks.” This week’s breakthrough follows others in recent months, including the reform of a law that purged former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party from government posts. More steps are needed — most important, agreement on a law distributing Iraqi oil revenue among provinces and allowing for new investment. But it’s now clear that the political progress that the Bush administration hoped would follow the surge of U.S. forces in Iraq has finally begun. How can the next president preserve that momentum? Democrat Barack Obama continues to argue that only the systematic withdrawal of U.S. combat units will force Iraqi leaders to compromise. Yet the empirical evidence of the past year suggests the opposite: that only the greater security produced and guaranteed by American troops allows a political environment in which legislative deals and free elections are feasible.

And the Journal editors have similar thoughts:

We used to hear from Joe Biden, the Pentagon and others on both sides of the aisle in Washington that only political reconciliation and a U.S. force pullout could stem the violence. They got it backwards. The “surge” and General David Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy, in a matter of months, turned or neutralized Sunni and Shiite militias and all but defeated al Qaeda in Iraq. Only now that it’s calmer do Iraqis feel secure enough to make political progress.

That does seem to be fodder for a decent debate: who was right and why does it make a difference going forward? Given all the theatrics over the last few days, an enormous audience will be waiting to hear Barack Obama explain when he figured out that the surge was a good idea and what finally convinced him.