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Promises, PromisesWhat happens if the Iraqis fail again?

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007, at 12:31 AM ET

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John Dickerson wonders why President Bush is "betting the farm" on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

What about Iraqi politics has changed that now permits Maliki to do all these things, most of which the factions of his fragile ruling coalition have thus far refused to do?

Speaking of his fragile coalition, how will Maliki get away with letting American troops raid the Baghdad enclaves of the Mahdi Army, Muqtada Sadr's radical Shiite militia? Without the support of Sadr's faction, Maliki's government will fall. It would be great if Maliki could assemble a coalition without Sadr; but unless something is going on deep behind the scenes, there's no indication that he can.

As Bush said, the whole point of this surge is to help assure the survival, durability, and legitimacy of a central Iraqi government. If the government founders on these sorts of issues, an influx of American troops—whether they number 20,000 or 200,000—won't matter.

This leads to the cynical interpretation of tonight's speech: The benchmarks place such an overwhelming burden on Maliki's government, he'll unavoidably fail to meet them; when this failure becomes clear, and the American surge does little to improve matters, Bush—or, better still, his successor—will pull out with a shrug and the patina of good conscience, absolving himself of blame for the deluge that follows. Whether or not the leaders of the White House devised the new plan with this scenario in mind (and I don't think they did), it offers a tempting way out if worse comes to dead worst.

But here we come to this speech's most dreadful shortcoming: Bush's failure to outline any backup plan at all if his plan comes to naught. Worse still, he strongly suggested that he will resist such a plan. A realistic backup plan would rely on region-wide diplomacy to keep the conflagration of all-out civil war from spreading across the Middle East.

Halfway into the speech, it seemed for a moment that Bush might address this issue. "Succeeding in Iraq also requires … stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge," he said, a task that "begins with addressing Iran and Syria." But then, instead of calling for, say, talks with those countries, Bush said that their regimes have provided material support to the insurgents. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," the president warned. "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Really? All we can muster for Iraq is a paltry 20,000 extra troops; even they will accomplish little without massive infusions from a dubious Iraqi military and miraculous political breakthroughs from a faltering Iraqi government—and President Bush, at such a desperate moment, talks about expanding the war to Iran and Syria? It's shiveringly scary.