Opinion (Michael Hirsh): A Bust in Bakersville

The Iraq Study Group

What's happening in Washington right now is the worst sort of cover-your-backside politics. The nation's officialdom, Republicans and Democrats both, continue to indulge in the outer-galactic notion that Iraq is "winnable" or "losable." President Bush still seems to be deluding himself that "Al Qaeda" is behind the violence in Iraq, as he said in Latvia yesterday, and this week he's supposed to meet with Maliki in Jordan in hopes he can get the Iraqi leader to crack down on the violence. This requires the pretense that Maliki doesn't owe his political life to one of the chief authors of the violence, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Assuming the Bush trip was well-thought-out strategy and not merely a political ploy—not a safe assumption—the only possible explanation for it is that the president wants to split Maliki off from Sadr, forcing him to reform his government. But that is playing with dynamite in the middle of a conflagration. And Sadr, in any case, is probably too smart to give up his political hold on Maliki: his loyalists in Parliament announced today that they would merely suspend their participation in the government.

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