Bush is an actor in need of an exit line - The beginning of the end

When President Bush says something first, then senior officials repeat it in the press, there is a message he wants to send to my fellow Americans. That became clear last week when the President took the rare step of providing an “update on the situation in Iraq”, then National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to explain the unsatisfactory progress an interim report says the Iraqi government has made (or not made) on most of the benchmarks they have to meet in order to justify a continued American military presence.

The President basically ignored the findings of the interim report, mostly because the news was not good: unsatisfactory progress on every one of the major political objectives despite a significant increase in American casualties. In other words, our men and women in uniform are fighting to buy the Iraqi government time to work out their political differences, but they’re just not doing it. The worst part is that the President is claiming that the full report from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in September might look different from the interim report - even though the Iraqi parliament is taking a vacation for the month of August. In other words, whatever progress they’ve made up to now is the same amount of progress they will have made in September: none. But with the Secretary of Defense saying the solution in Iraq is political, not military, and Congress ready to pull the plug on funding, the President is in a bind. That’s why he’s moving to marginalize the Maliki government and seek a political solution in the provinces among the people.

The President said he’d like to see us in a position in which our “troop posture” would be to guard Iraq’s borders, embed with Iraqi security services and train them, help them “deal with violent elements in their society”, and keep enough Special Forces to “chase down” Al Qaeda. He also introduced the new concept of “bottom-up reconciliation” on the grassroots level, which is different from “top-down reconciliation” which can only come from the central government in Baghdad. Both of these ideas, troop posture and bottom-up reconciliation, will be critical in the obvious exit strategy the President is considering. And despite what the President claims, this strategy will have nothing to do with any “results on the ground” in Iraq.

“Bottom-up reconciliation” is a tactic the US military is using in Sunni areas. What it means is that we’re willing to forgive those who have carried out attacks on Americans as long as they promise to turn their attention to Al Qaeda. We’ll even give them money and let them keep whatever weapons they confiscate from Al Qaeda in the process. This is designed to create an intelligence and support network separate from the central government. That way, when our footprint is reduced, our Special Forces will at least have baseline knowledge of who is supposed to be with us. Of course, this spits in the faces of the soldiers and marines who fought the “Sunni insurgency” earlier in the campaign, but this President has never thought much about the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women anyway. He needs to demonstrate that after seven months, the troop “surge” he announced in January has led to some kind of political progress, even if it doesn’t involve the Maliki government.

Prime Minister Maliki is no longer with us – and the President knows it. If, as the President claims, he has made it clear to the Prime Minister that our commitment to Iraq isn’t “open-ended” and if, as the President claims, he has made the Prime Minister aware that the increase in troop levels was designed to give the central government a safer environment in which to work out their differences, then the Prime Minister has clearly made his choice by not making deals with the Sunnis and the Kurds. He’s not making any political concessions to Iraq’s minority groups because he just doesn’t have to. He then kicked sand in the President’s face by saying the Iraqis could provide their own security if the US military pulled out because either way, the Shia own Iraq.

The exit strategy will be to say the US military is did what it could, the Iraqi security forces are doing everything they can, the tribal sheikhs are doing everything they can, but the central government isn’t passing any legislation, so it’s their fault. We will keep the Iraqi borders secure, train Iraqi security forces from secure locations away from the front lines, and keep Special Forces in the country to fight Al Qaeda, and President Bush can retire to Crawford, Texas and watch as the sectarian warfare he facilitated rages throughout the Middle East.