In the very first sentence of his latest column, Charles Krauthammer explains, “After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality.”
Given that we’re talking about Krauthammer, whose appreciation for “surreality” is practically limitless, the reader knows immediately that this column is going to be painful.
The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong critic of the Iraq war. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird (D-Wash.): Al-Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.
As critics acknowledge military improvement, the administration is finally beginning to concede the political reality that the Maliki government is hopeless. Bush’s own national security adviser had said as much in a leaked memo back in November. I and others have been arguing that for months. And when Levin returned and openly called for the Iraqi parliament to vote out the Maliki government, the president pointedly refused to contradict him.
This convergence about the actual situation in Baghdad will take some of the drama out the highly anticipated Petraeus moment next month. We know what the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are going to say when they testify before Congress because multiple sources have already told us what is happening on the ground.
In other words, Krauthammer believes he has stumbled upon an elusive consensus that everyone can embrace: surge good, Maliki bad. Or, as Josh Marshall summarized, “[T]he stars are now aligned for a grand bargain, in which war critics confess to the military success of the surge and warmongers blame everything that has gone wrong on Mr. Maliki.”
Even by Krauthammer standards, this is pretty silly.
What’s more, it appears to be an attempt to buy more time for a policy that hasn’t worked, doesn’t work, and stands no chance of ever working.
We should have given up on Nouri al-Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.
The choice is difficult because replacing the Maliki government will take time and because there is no guarantee of ultimate political success. Nonetheless, continuing the surge while finally trying to change the central government is the most rational choice because the only available alternative is defeat — a defeat that is not at all inevitable and that would be both catastrophic and self-inflicted.
Once the Bush administration is finished “replacing” Maliki, we can expect the White House (and the Weekly Standard, and Joe Lieberman’s office) to argue, “Well, we have to give the new Prime Minister time to make a difference.” Come January, they’ll say, “He’s barely started!” Come June, it’ll be, “Our Founding Fathers weren’t expected to establish the United States in less than a year; why are the defeatists so impatient?”
In one sense, Krauthammer’s piece is helpful in telegraphing the next punch. The discussion for the next few weeks is going to go like this:
Bush ally: The surge is working; there have been some military successes.
War critic: The point of the surge was political progress, of which there is none.
Bush ally: Exactly. That’s why we need to replace Maliki.
It’s quite tiresome, and I’m disappointed to hear a handful of Dems play along by calling for Maliki’s ouster. In case it wasn’t clear before, Maliki is the symptom, not the disease.
Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. […]
Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.
Sectarian fracturing even extends to the electricity grid, where armed groups have seized control of key switching stations and refused to share power with Baghdad and other provinces.
The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.
Ultimately, Krauthammer’s grand bargain is a sucker’s bet.