For Now, the Maliki PrimaryBy E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, August 24, 2007; A15
The surest sign of how bad our choices in Iraq have become is the eagerness of both of our political parties to blame the entire mess on the man American officials helped install in his job. After all, it was taken as an American victory back in April 2006 when Maliki replaced Ibrahim al-Jafari, who faced many of the same criticisms as prime minister that Maliki does today.
Now, Maliki is the problem. Among Democrats, both Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton have called for replacing him with "a less divisive and more unifying figure," as Clinton put it.<>
Maliki has done a less than stellar job, but it's absurd to place all the blame on him for the failure of a political process that American policies set in motion. Nor can he be faulted for the administration's lack of foresight -- before we started this war -- in anticipating how difficult it would be to achieve reconciliation between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
The debate as it's currently configured puts a much higher short-term political burden on congressional Democrats than on Republicans. The president has the easier political objective: He needs only to block congressional action that would force him to alter his policy. As long as most Republicans stick with him, he wins.
Democrats, on the other hand, are in a classic damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation. Yesterday, for example, House Democrats held a private conference call discussing whether they should push a proposal by Reps. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii and John Tanner of Tennessee that would require the Pentagon to produce a plan for redeployment of American troops.
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The sad fact is that this war has created stasis in American politics. If Bush doesn't budge, he is likely to be able to continue his approach -- even if a majority of the country has turned against it and even if there is no political reconciliation in Iraq. No wonder our politicians find it so attractive to trash Maliki. He has become the punching bag for American failures. But come 2008, if things don't get better in Iraq, it is Bush's policies, not Maliki's, that American voters will judge.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082301929_pf.html 
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