The ‘Hail Mary’

Having just posted on Lt. Col. North’s reaction to the president’s address and his new plan on Iraq, here’s how political analyst and commentator George Will sees it.

The president’s gamble is not a larger one than Democrats are making with what they are adopting as a party position. They are right that the “surge” probably will not pull Iraq back from the abyss. But they are wrong to think that their policy is more than a variant of the president’s policy: Shock treatment for Iraq’s government, which is threatened with what, on Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice icily called, with studied vagueness, “the consequences now of nonperformance.”

All sides recognize that the status quo in Iraq is untenable. Therefore those — almost all Democrats, and a growing minority of Republicans — who hope to block the “surge” are really for setting in motion a swift and irreversible process of U.S. withdrawal, in the hope that it will galvanize Iraq’s government to military and policy capabilities that U.S. training and subsidies have so far been unable to produce. And if not, Iraq and the region probably will become a cauldron of conflicts with genocidal stakes for the sectarian groups involved.

And the first part of that paragraph sets up the likelihood of the second part.

Bush and his thoughtful critics, ostensibly at daggers drawn, are actually in agreement on three points. First, the failed policy of the last three years is both militarily and politically unsustainable. Second, any substantial departure from that policy must involve a leap into the dark — a bet on the future about which no reasonable person can be confident. Third, Wednesday night the nation embarked upon the beginning of the end of U.S. suzerainty in Iraq, where, Maliki has said, with more bravado than plausibility, that by June — about when the full surge probably will reach Iraq — his government will be able to handle its security challenges.

It’s better to hear Maliki say that than the opposite. Do we really want to hear his projection that they won’t be able or willing?

Ultimately, this seems like late in the fourth quarter, and such a distance to the goal that the quarterback drops back and just hurls one up there with all he’s got.

Today, in Iraq, the president’s policy — and that of his critics — is to hope for a miracle.