For All the Marbles
It's not that there were a lot of easy choices here. Bush wound up putting all his chips into a partnership with Maliki, a leader he doesn't have much reason to really trust. And it's not as if the Democrats are offering a lot of great ideas, either. The pull-'em-out-now crowd didn't cough up much beyond that idealistic notion, which the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said would be a complete disaster, producing "a significant power vacuum, greater human suffering, regional destabilization, and a threat to the global economy." In this last election, voters set the table for a great bipartisan opportunity to rethink the war. The Iraq Study Group did that, recommending withdrawal of combat forces by early 2008, but once again, the politicians in Washington couldn't see their way clear to compromise.
And so here we are-with a president bucking up an Iraqi leadership that doesn't deserve it and a Congress fuming at both. Meantime, more troops are headed off to a war bound to get bloodier, and uglier.
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