President Bush gained more time for his policy on Iraq in last week's presentations to Congress and the US public, scoring a political victory over his Democratic opponents and reassuring those wavering Republicans who have been tempted to support a rapid troop withdrawal.
By agreeing to reduce the extra troops deployed this year for the surge policy over the next nine months he has undercut those calling for a withdrawal deadline and made a return to pre-surge troop numbers by next summer look like a compromise. A clever exercise in the art of domestic politics, it will change little on the ground in Iraq, where political movement is pitifully slow and everyday security remains a disaster.
Mr Bush has thereby ensured that the Iraq issue will remain centrally on the political agenda during the presidential and congressional election campaigns next year. The problem will be handed over to the next administration. And, if he gets his way, the US presence in Iraq will be extended indefinitely.
That is the burden of a reference in his televised speech to keeping US troops and bases in Iraq to protect American interests in the region, even after the main war-fighting force is withdrawn as military tasks are handed over to Iraqi troops.
There has been something of a polling swing back to the administration following the presentations by Iraq commander-in-chief General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to Congress, which argued that more time was needed for existing policies to be played out. But because so little has changed on the ground such a policy remains so provocative that it invites a further intensification of the military resistance to the US presence and of the civil war between Sunni and Shia militias. Last week's assassination of the sheikh from Anbar province who engineered Sunni co-operation with Iraqi and US troops against al-Qaeda, and who met Mr Bush during his recent visit there, is a case in point.
If that happens, last week's tactical victory will rebound on Mr Bush and his administration. Domestic opinion about the war is very much determined by its military intensity, putting a real burden on the troops serving there.
Democrats cannot summon the 67 votes necessary in the US Senate to override a Bush veto of their refusal to pass a war budget. It looks as if the anti-war political campaign to convince wavering congressional Republicans has failed. But at the congressional hustings a number of them are vulnerable to the popular mood against the war and for a quick withdrawal. That sentiment will also feed into the presidential campaign, tending to polarise it for and against the war.
And there is a downside for Republican candidates seeking re-election in that Mr Bush himself is unpopular and a lame duck in domestic policy - facts that will tell against his party's candidates unless his fortunes change substantially. War politics are local too.