Two Guys, Tough Talk, No Answers
If Shakespeare were chronicling the increasingly frantic debate in Washington over how to fix America's strategy in Iraq, he might call it a tale, full of sound and fury, all too likely signifying nothing. There certainly is plenty of noise. Everybody, it seems, is in the middle of a massive policy review-the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council.
And then there's the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton. Only in Washington could something called a "study group," composed of sexagenarian and septuagenarian foreign policy mandarins, achieve rock-star status. When the group releases its widely telegraphed findings this week, the moment will come complete with wall-to-wall media coverage, a quickie book deal, and, of course, impossibly high expectations.
Even inside the White House, many now worry that any change in Iraq policy may be too late. The fear is that Iraq's cycle of insurgent and sectarian violence is now driven largely by its own perverse, immutable logic. These days, the Bush administration is measuring its progress in part by how much security authority it has turned over to the Iraqis. This means, however, that as time goes on, Washington will have less and less sway.
When President Bush met in Jordan last week with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the message was decidedly mixed. One day after a leaked memo by Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, described Maliki the way Shakespeare might have, as either a knave or a fool, Bush hailed the embattled Iraqi as a "strong leader"-as if saying it for all the world to hear might actually make it so. "Ay," as the Bard wrote of Lear, "every inch a king."
Bush's brief articulation of the limits he has set on the ongoing policy review-no quick withdrawals, no timetables-surprised nobody. Even though his aides are promising new policies in the coming weeks, they might, after all this noise, end up signifying very little.
This story appears in the December 11, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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