TEL AVIV --- In advance of his surprise trip to Iraq this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates showed up here trailing a comet's tail of bad news behind him. After a series of bombs on Wednesday killed more than 180 people in Iraq, Gates, appearing with Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, tried to assure the Israelis and the world that Iraq was a work in progress and that better days lay ahead.
He insisted that President Bush's surge strategy anticipated the heightened in violence in Iraq, because Washington expected "that the insurgency and others would increase the violence so make the people of Iraq believe the plan was a failure."
The response, he said, would be American persistence "to show that it is not."
The problem, or course, is that that game has already been called. The surge may eventually prove successful, but Iraq is already an irreversible failure. There have been too many casualties, too many wounded. Add to that the fact that success is no longer definable or quantifiable, and there are no logical points of disengagement.
So what now?
The president this week, in renewing his threat to veto the emergency war supplemental that Democrats will send him soon, warned that, "We cannot legislate defeat in this vital war." But failure is not always defeat, and in Iraq they are not interchangeable. American forces are in no danger of defeat in Iraq, because the insurgents can't win in any traditional sense: Victory and defeat are variables in a military equation, and militarily, the insurgents do not measure up. To talk about victory and defeat in Iraq is to cling to the notion that Iraq is a military problem with a military solution. It is not.
The volatile politics of the Middle East are a continuous refutation that military successes or defeats are ever as conclusive as we might expect. After 60 years of conflict, and still in the thrall of the debacle they call Second Lebanon War, Israelis are stumped about where to go next in their dealings with the Palestinians. The Arab League, after 60 years of conflict is talking about an "Arab initiative" for peace with Israel. No one is under any illusion that fighting here is at an end -- indeed, there is constant preparation for the next war -- but there is now a kind of weary understanding that the solution lies in some kind of negotiated deal. "Israel should give to peace the same money it now gives to security," said Israeli Housing Minister Meir Shetreet, an ambitious cabinet member trying to raise his profile by staking out what is he regards as a bold position. But even the most frustrated and cynical of voices here lament that there is no partner with whom to cut a deal.
President Bush should understand now that the war in Iraq will end in exactly the kind of military ambiguity that exists today. There will be no "mission accomplished" moment. The U.S. exit from Iraq will, in the end, be a negotiated affair for the American president, either with the Iraqi government, with his own conscience or with the rage of the American people.
"An American withdrawal from Iraq is inevitable," says Gidi Grinstein, a veteran of the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, and now the director of the Reut Institute, and Israeli think tank based here in Tel Aviv. "There is no other way."
Grinstein consults on ideas and strategy for the Israeli government and some of its agencies. The name of his institute, "reut" come from the Hebrew expression "to see," suggesting long-range vision, and its focus, he says, is to try to find and explore blind-spots in policy and strategy. "Where people get in trouble is where they don't know that they don't know."
Iraq has been a monument to policy based on blind-spots, and the more quickly that is acknowledged, the sooner we can adjust and adapt -- which has been a problem for the White House.
The president's inflexibility on Iraq is a strange ideological outcropping that blocks the path to any real solution, or any progress. Iraq is a failed mess, and until he understands that, cleaning it up will be infinitely more difficult than it already is.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has said that the Iraqis will assume responsibility for security in different regions of the country by the end of the year, and Bush warned earlier this week that, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America." But death and destruction in the Middle East is, not to put to fine a point on it, a dead issue. And the consequences of failure in Iraq, like a daily shower of New Year's Eve confetti, are hard to miss.
In Fallujah on Friday, Gates seemed to be hinting at the outlines of an exit strategy. He urged that the Iraqis focus on a negotiated political reconciliation and adopt it into law as a prerequisite for success. The Americans, he suggested, can't stick around forever.
"The clock is ticking," he said. Indeed, for us, it may have already run out.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C. His weekly TAP Online column appears on Fridays.
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