Putting Obama on its cover, Der Spiegel declares, “Germany meets the SuperStar.”

Yesterday, Barack Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 at the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in Tiergarten, the Central Park of Berlin, a crowd which dwarfed even the 75,000 that the Democratic presidential candidate drew in Oregon before the primary there. “America has no better partner than Europe,” Obama told the enormous crowd, urging those in attendance to continue to participate in and support the war in Afghanistan, which is unpopular in Europe and especially in Germany.

Still only the junior senator from Illinois, Obama was greeted as one might a head of state, with adulation from the gathered masses and rave reviews from the European media. “His speech was a masterpiece in the art of political magic,” declared Der Spiegel, the leading German news magazine.

John McCain — who could only hope to draw a fraction of the 200,000 that his Democratic rival drew to the Tiergarten yesterday — was left carping about how inappropriate it was for a candidate not yet elected president to be giving speeches in European capitals. The putative Republican presidential nominee was reduced to a photo op in a restaurant in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio. The senator from Arizona went to Schmidt’s Restaurant und Sausage Haus for what Schimidt’s calls “The Best of the Wurst!” — which some might say is an apt description of the Republican nominee himself.

Barack Obama meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Baghdad on Monday.

If there is one issue that arguably helped more than any other to propel Barack Obama to the nomination, it was that of the war in Iraq. Had Hillary Clinton come out against the war instead of voting for it, she would have left no opening for Obama to use the issue of the war to stir the grassroots of the Democratic Party and the netroots of the Internet to mobilize for him and against her. So it is now the junior senator from Illinois, not the junior senator from New York who is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

And while the Iraq war has fallen far behind the economy — which 44% of those surveyed in mid-June by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press rated as the most important issue for them — Pew found that 19% ranked Iraq as the most important issue facing the country, just ahead of energy and gas prices at 17% and ten points ahead of health care at 9%.

But Obama’s trip to Iraq — presenting him with an opportunity to articulate a clear and convincing policy on the war — has already tripped up Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s semi-competent Shia prime minister. “Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed support for Obama’s troop withdrawal plans,” the German magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend, quoting Maliki as saying of Obama’s intention to withdraw the bulk of US troops from Iraq within 16 months, “That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of changes.”

The Spiegel report forced Maliki into wild spin control, the prime minister denying having expressed support for Obama’s plan and claiming that he was misquoted by Spiegel. But Spiegel — the most respected of Germany’s newsmagazines, which makes Time and Newsweek look fluffy in comparison with its Teutonic seriousness — stood by its report and on Monday, Spiegel posted a transcript of the interview with Maliki on its website.

“So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat,” Maliki is quoted by Spiegel as saying in the interview. “But that isn’t the case at all,” he continues. “If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias. The American lead negotiators realize this now, and that’s why I expect to see an agreement taking shape even before the end of President Bush’s term in office. With these negotiations, we will start the whole thing over again, on a clearer, better basis, because the first proposals [from the Bush administration] were unacceptable to us.

The flap over Maliki’s interview with Der Spiegel is bound to embarass John McCain, anxious as the putative Republican nominee is to portray Obama as conceding defeat in Iraq. The Maliki vs. Spiegel affair is also likely to embarrass George W. Bush, who undoubtedly views the Iraqi prime minister as his man in Baghdad — or at least, the closest that he’s going to get to a compliant ally-cum-puppet in the waning days of his second term as president.