George Bush went on American TV last night to defend his Iraq policy once more. However, his arguments still don't wash, argues Tony Kinsella.
US victories in Iraq are as thin on the ground as domestic ones are for the Bush administration. The House testimony by Gen David Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker offered a rare example of something, almost, panning out for the White House.
They succeeded partially in convincing US parliamentarians that (just) enough was actually working in Iraq for the Congress not to consider cutting off funding for the war.
It was an extraordinary Alice-in-Wonderland image of elected leaders abdicating policy decisions to serving officers and diplomats, where all participants accepted that the slides, charts and arguments, although flawed, were just solid enough to let them agree, in the words of Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, that "the next six months in Iraq are crucial - and always will be".
Washington set 18 benchmarks that its 21,000-troop surge, agreed last January, should achieve. The surge has grown to 30,000 troops and even by the particular standards of the Bush Oval Office, only three of those benchmarks have been met. The results on four others are "partial" and 11 are recognised as clear failures.
Arming and funding Sunni tribal militias in their conflicts with Islamic jihadists has reduced attacks on US forces in some provinces, but everybody knows that those same militias could return to the insurgency tomorrow.
Sectarian slaughter in some areas of Baghdad may have declined, but it is impossible to say whether that decline is due to the presence of additional US forces, or simply the result of successful ethnic cleansing. When all the Sunnis or Shia have been driven from an area, there are simply none left to slaughter.
Deciding that a corpse which has been shot through the back of the head is a victim of sectarian extermination, while one shot through the front of the head is a victim of ordinary crime, may help the statistics, but offers a very flimsy basis for claiming that overall security has improved.
The good news is that Washington is, at long last, listening to its professionals. Had it done so in 2002, the US would probably not have attacked Iraq in the first place. The bad news is that the US body politic continues to demonstrate a structural incapacity to assume its functions of leadership.
Vietnam analogies are now allowed in US political discourse, but avoid one crucial distinction. While the US-Vietnam war was internationally legal, it was domestically illegal. The US invasion of Iraq was legal in US domestic terms, but violated international law.
The Saigon government requested US military support, making the presence of US forces internationally legal, but Congress never voted for a war. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution provided a fig leaf, which the successive Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations all stretched far beyond its limit.
Although the US had no basis in international law for its unilateral aggression against Iraq, the US Congress did vote the necessary powers to President Bush. A significant degree of the political responsibility for the bloody mess that is today's Iraq thus lies with the US Congress. It is a responsibility that, one day, it will have to discharge.
Deciding when that day falls has become the central, if ignored, question of US politics, the so-called elephant in the room nobody is ready to acknowledge on Capitol Hill.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction turned out to be every bit as fictitious as informed observers believed them to be. The flowering of democracy on the banks of the Tigris has turned into anarchic carnage. Gen Petraeus hammered a key nail into the coffin of White House arguments on Iraq as a key element of the global war on terror when he admitted that "the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources".
Nobody in Washington any longer talks of victory in Iraq in serious terms, publicly reflecting what most have long privately accepted. The question now is how to best organise the inevitable US departure.
Withdrawing 160,000 troops, upwards of another 100,000 civilian contractors and all their equipment, is a logistical challenge that would take at least six weeks for even a Dunkirk-style debacle, and three to five years for a more dignified exit.
Washington, and most likely President Bush's successor, will have to face that challenge, first politically, then practically.
Traumatic conflict is by its nature unsustainable. A classic row within a couple cannot be maintained if the relationship is to survive. Strikers quickly arrive at a point in a continuing dispute where they have lost more money than they can ever hope to gain, even if all their demands are met.
War is the ultimate example of this unsustainable nature of traumatic conflict. The hallmark of a competent organisation is its ability to allocate at least some of its better brains to the task of planning for post-conflict situations, while incompetent organisations focus their best assets on the management of the conflict itself.
It took Washington three years to seriously address its role in achieving a level of security in Iraq capable of, possibly, allowing for some political progress. Not the US, not Iraq, nor any of us, can afford to wait another three years for Washington to begin working out its exit strategy.
Questions ranging from a continuing US military presence in the region, whether an organised partition of Iraq is either desirable or possible - and if so whether such a partition would destroy the Anglo-French-Turkish post-first Word War organisation of the entire Middle East - need to be asked, explored and resolved. The precondition is US acceptance that whatever it sought to achieve with its ill-starred 2003 war of aggression, the result is a horrific mess.
Carnage in Iraq, US elections in 2008, and just possibly the political ambitions of one David Petraeus, all suggest that this denouement is on its way.
The cold light of dawning reality may banish many shadows - but the next reality sunrise in Washington is not due before January 2009.
