Waiting for Miracles

You'll need to be a Salon subscriber to read the whole thing, but Walter Shapiro has this to say today:

Bush, at his Thursday press conference in Jordan with a still petulant Maliki, memorably commented that "this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it all."

Hard though it may be to type these words, Bush is right. Barring the kind of light-up-the-sky miracle that inspires the creation of a major new religion, there will be nothing graceful about the route home from the rout in Iraq. No regional conference nor redeployment strategy is likely to be any more effective than Hadley's dreams of transforming Maliki into a competent leader. (There was something inherently comic about a Bush administration memo complaining that a foreign leader is the captive of "a small circle" of advisors who are "coloring his actions and his interpretations of reality.")

Like so much else, the route out of Iraq will be dictated not by American self-interest (how to preserve our influence and prestige) or moralism (how to lessen the suffering of the Iraqi people), but domestic politics. The expectation is that Bush has to disengage from Iraq over the next year or so to prevent the Republican Party from suffering a 2008 political defeat so severe that it will make the recent congressional elections look like "morning in America" by comparison.