Iraq reality check

IF THERE WAS GOOD NEWS from President Bush’s news conference Wednesday, it’s that the president is not adopting a bunker mentality and is addressing the deteriorating conditions in Iraq. The bad news is that the more he talks, the more apparent it becomes that there is no easy way to reverse them.

That is a painful admission for an administration two weeks before a midterm election, so any sense of despair was wrapped in more purposeful language. Washington is issuing benchmarks -- don’t call them timetables -- to Baghdad. The administration routinely changes course in pursuit of its goals. Progress is being made. And so on.

The president at one point said Americans will “support the war as long as they see a path to victory.” It is a curious formulation. If Bush believes the war in Iraq is central to the war on terror, why is support for it dependent on how winnable it is? Perhaps the formulation is unavoidable during election season. It would be unrealistic to expect Bush to say that because the U.S. has no choice but to “win,” he is doubling the number of American troops in Iraq.

So the next round of Washington’s ongoing battle of semantics may entail defining “victory” downward. If the war was initially supposed to bequeath the Middle East a proverbial shining city on a hill -- an Arab middle-class democracy that would transform the region -- the goal now seems to be to leave Iraq intact, if bloodied. Or to prevent the country from becoming a broken state that is a haven to terrorists. Victory, in the end, may simply be a matter of avoiding a worst-case scenario.

To be fair to Bush, U.S. woes are partly a function of the degree to which the administration has ceded sovereignty to the Iraqi people. There is an awkward tension now between Iraqi self-determination and U.S. responsibility for what transpires in the country. If Iraq’s majority Shiite leaders want to use their democratically acquired power to settle scores with a long-dominant minority and engage in ethnic cleansing, what is the proper response of the United States? Reassert control of the country, or walk away?

Such blunt questions may be premature. But they underlie the tension between Washington and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, who held his own news conference Wednesday to criticize U.S. forces for conducting a raid in Sadr City, apparently without Iraqi government approval.

Bush is walking a tightrope, trying to browbeat Maliki, the head of a sovereign state, into cracking down on one of his political allies, the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sadr controls 30 seats in parliament and two ministries. He despises the West. Without appearing to dictate to his Iraqi counterpart, Bush has to make Maliki realize that he can’t allow his supporters to run death squads that prey on Sunnis.

That won’t be easy. Nothing in Iraq is, and it gets more difficult with each passing day. Here’s hoping that it won’t get much worse in the next two weeks, and that Bush will be more candid about his plans on Nov. 8.