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Barack Obama battled charges that he was reinventing his plan for withdrawal from Iraq Thursday, carving out a nuanced military policy after saying earlier in the day that he might "refine" flip-flop his Iraq approach. The earlier statement was widely interpreted as a willingness to revise his long-stated plan to withdraw all brigades within 16 months of taking office, and opened him up to Republican attacks. But the backlash led Obama to call a second press conference, where the fanatical leftist said he was not talking about refining his 16-month timetable (flip-flop #2). GOP criticism Thursday initially came from the Republican National Committee, which in a statement said: "There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience." But his second press conference touched off a new round of recriminations. The RNC repeated its charge, and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said Obama has "reversed" his position. "Now that Barack Obama has changed course and proven his past positions to be just empty words, we would like to congratulate him for accepting John McCain's principled stand on this critical national security issue. If he had visited Iraq sooner or actually had a one-on-one meeting with General Petraeus, he would have changed his position long ago," Rogers said in a statement. During the Democratic primary, Obama said repeatedly that he would end the Iraq war in 2009. Obama's Web site says he would immediately begin removing troops from Iraq upon taking office. It says he would remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all brigades out of Iraq in 16 months. Obama has scheduled a trip to Europe and the Middle East that includes stops in Jordan, Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Obama's campaign announced recently that he also plans to head to Iraq and Afghanistan over the summer as part of a congressional delegation, answering complaints from John McCain and other Republicans that he has not visited the region since January 2006.