Spencer Ackerman fears that violence in Iraq is again on the upswing. And, though he doesn't say this, if violence jumps again, we will almost certainly leave. By letting the surge redefine success as a reduction in violence rather than sticking to its original aim, political reconciliation, we created a situation in which our efforts in Iraq were totally dependent on a side variable, and thus we focused on that side variable. If that side variable explodes, we're out -- there's nothing, at this point, with our military as overstretched as it is, that we can even do. The problem is, we have no end game, no final push that uses the relative quiet of the current moment to set in place some path that pushes the country towards reconciliation. When the surge didn't originally create reconciliation, the Bush administration, and the Republican Party, decided to embrace the short-term imperative of security gains as a political lifeline. But now, as the insurgents adapt to our tactics and as other Iraqi actors who were waiting us out grow restless, we've really got no strategy pushing towards any more enduring stability, and because domestic Republican actors have made the institution of a timetable into some sort of partisan argument, we can't even use the ordered and predictable pressure of withdrawal to make a final, massive, push.
