The Iraq End-game

The parameters of the September decision on Iraq are beginning to come into sharper focus. The posturing begins with quiet feelers from the White House for some kind of face-saver from the Congress:

White House officials have not indicated how a compromise might look. Administration officials and some Democrats favor shifting U.S. forces to a support role: fighting insurgents, training Iraqi forces and providing other backup.

Many Democrats want such a shift in the next few months, but Bush has said Iraq must become more stable first. In a news conference last month, Bush said he "would like to see us in a different configuration at some point in time."

But when you examine the idea of merely providing training, it falls apart upon inspection. By all accounts, the Iraqi army is in no shape to take the lead with US training:

The American commander in Baquba, Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, and his counterpart south of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, pointed to a variety of problems with the Iraqi forces, including a shortage of trained troops and a lack of basic supplies like ammunition, radios and trucks.

"They're not quite up to the job yet," General Bednarek said in an interview with The Associated Press in Baquba.

At the same time, the surge has, in fact, a de facto expiration date of next April, whatever the politicians' spin:

The reality, officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort.

By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment. The latter, said one White House official, "is not something the president wants to do" and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.

What Bush is hoping for, obviously, is that by next April he will have enough of a facade of "progress" to start withdrawing troops without looking like the man who lost a war. The Democrats therefore have two options. They can begin to cut off funding in September. If they don't get a veto-proof majority, and the president refuses to budge, they can still argue that they are doing all they can. Or they can try to provide cover for the president in crafting some kind of bullshit exercize in which "training" becomes the public goal, while withdrawal is the reality.

At this point, it seems to me, their political and moral objective should be simply to withdraw as many troops from a self-defeating occupation as swiftly and as shrewdly as possible. After the brutal partisanship with which they have been treated, why should they help Bush now? That's why, I think, Cheney is trying to extend the war. He can't win in Iraq or Washington under the current conditions. So he's trying to extend it by a game-changing expansion of the conflict.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)