Product Re-Positioning

"New Improved Surge! Now with even less surge-iness!

Yes! We've made 'New Surge' longer lasting, and dramatically decreased expectations, to make 'New Surge' better than ever! Try 'New Surge' for all your foreign policy quagmire needs! You'll be glad you did!

Now in a convenient 10-pound sack!"

WASHINGTON, April 27 — The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year. ...

Several American officials who have spoken recently with Mr. Maliki say they believe that he would like to achieve the kind of political reconciliation that Mr. Bush outlined in January as the ultimate goal of the troop increase. But they say the Iraqi prime minister appears to have little ability to manage the required legislation, including bills requiring fair distribution of oil revenues among Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and reversing the American-led de-Baathification that barred many Sunnis from participation in the new government. ...

But the new view of Mr. Maliki’s limitations was put bluntly by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, who spent the week pressing Congress not to put limits on either the timing or conduct of his operations, as he described what he discovered upon returning to Iraq after a two-year hiatus.

“He’s not the Prime Minister Tony Blair of Iraq,” General Petraeus said of Mr. Maliki on Thursday. “He does not have a parliamentary majority. He does not have his ministers in all of the different ministries,” and they “sometimes sound a bit discordant in their statements to the press and their statements to other countries. It’s a very, very challenging situation in which to lead.”

Mr. Bush was careful when he announced his new strategy in January to avoid public estimates of how quickly Mr. Maliki might take steps toward political reconciliation. Even now, White House officials are being careful not to describe with any precision the mix of benchmarks they expect Mr. Maliki to deliver.

By the time Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus complete a comprehensive assessment of progress in September, three months after the troop increase has been fully in place, American officials are hoping that some of the pieces of crucial legislation will have passed.

But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates found himself pressing Mr. Maliki last week to keep Parliament from taking a two-month summer break. If lawmakers remain in Baghdad, said one senior American official who did not want to be identified because he was discussing internal White House deliberations, “we’ll have some outputs then.”

He added, “That’s different from having outcomes,” drawing a distinction between a sign of activity and a sign of success, which could take considerably longer.

So, if Maliki can get the parliament to stay on the job during the long hot summer, then we might be able to look forward to ... not success, but maybe a step in the right direction. Our troops are dying to buy time for the Iraqis to, if they bother to cancel their vacation, potentially move vaguely forward.

Imagine if "the plan" was to keep our troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad until Bush managed to get comprehensive immigration reform, Social Security privatization, and single-payer health care enacted. While coping with the resignation of six cabinet secretaries, and some of the others are Democrats, Libertarians and Pat Robertson. And the Congressmen and Senators from the Western States were from a separate ethnic group that would not-so-secretly like their own country. And, oh yeah, there's a multi-sided shooting war going on in the streets, with explosions killing dozens on a regular basis, in neighborhoods that look like only slightly better than the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

You can see why Mr. Bush resists timetables for actually getting it done.

Speaking of the 'surge', here's what House Republican leader John Boehner had to say about it back in January:

I think it'll be rather clear in the next sixty to ninety days as to whether this plan's going to work.

So, what's the verdict?

Boehner?

Boehner?