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Who'll Blink First?President Bush plays chicken with the Democratic Congress.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, April 3, 2007, at 6:07 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Third, what is this business about winning the war? Does Cheney think we can win? And how is he defining the term?

In his press conference today, President Bush said the point of the U.S. strategy "is to give the Iraqi government time to reconcile, time to unify the country … to provide some breathing space for this democratically elected government to succeed."

Yet, in other news yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, urged the rejection of a bill that would allow thousands of former rank-and-file members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party to return to government. The bill—which would have reversed the draconian de-Baathification measures that fueled much of the insurgency three years ago—was seen as a crucial step in luring Sunni Arabs to take part in the political system. Sistani's disapproval almost certainly kills its chances—and, with it, the chances of reconciliation.

So, if reconciliation isn't going to happen, owing to internal politics and pressures, then what good is the time and breathing space that American blood and treasure are providing?

In a sense, President Bush is right when he calls the congressional timetables "a political dance." But does he realize he's the one who started the music?

Sen. Hillary Clinton has a seasoned sense of what's going on. "I saw a lot of what happened when my husband had a Republican Congress," she told reporters Tuesday. "We would stake out one position, they would stake out one position. And then people would begin to try to figure out how to narrow the difference. That's what should be happening here."

The question is whether it will happen. Over the next few weeks, the showdown will escalate. It will seem like a game of highway chicken, with both drivers gunning their engines, flashing their brights, tossing things that look like steering wheels out their windows. All the while they'll know that it won't be until late May, or by some calculations late June, that their cars will collide—i.e., that funding for the war really will run out—and they'll be hoping that somebody pulls over at the last minute.

There's language in both the House and Senate bills that suggests the Democrats are looking for a compromise, looking not so much for an abrupt end to our military involvement in Iraq but rather a reassessment and redirection of our policy toward Iraq and the region. Bush has less leverage in this game than his rhetoric would seem to indicate. The question is whether he'll realize this in time—whether he'll face the music and dance.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
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