The McCain campaign, which spent weeks beating up on Barack Obama for not visiting Iraq, is now moving to put a negative spin in advance on his planned trip to that country, which Obama has announced he'll undertake before the election.

Camp McCain's argument: What good is an Iraq trip if Obama has already made up his mind on what to do there as president anyway?

"I guess the question is, if indeed he's gonna to go to Iraq, and nothing that he sees will change or impact his decision-making on this, then why is he going?" McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers asked on a conference call with reporters just now.

"Is it just to check a box politically?" Rogers continued. "It sort of represents the kind of cynical politics that most people here, that the American people are pretty sick and tired of."

That's a case we'll be hearing from the McCain campaign a lot in the days ahead, particularly when the specifics of the trip become known and Obama actually goes to the war-torn country, something that will be an international story.

The Republican argument that the Dems want to pull out of Iraq regardless of the allegedly improving reality on the ground there is the GOP's best shot at fighting back against the Dem mirror-image argument, which is that the Repubs are committed to saying there forever regardless of reality. The battle is joined.