My Sunday Times column is up. Money quote:
The hope is that his declarations of no change of course are as credible as his insistence only a month ago that Rumsfeld would remain defense secretary until January 2009. Maybe it’s a last-ditch poker face in an intractable situation.
Or maybe — gulp — he really does believe that Iraq is still fixable, that Maliki will soon emerge as a unifying national leader, that American troops will manage to calm a civil war, that trained Iraqi troops will fight for a united democratic government rather than for sect or tribe or vengeance.
I hope it’s the former, with sanity soon to re-emerge. But I fear it may be the latter: and that his brinkmanship is something he has tragically mistaken for strength.
(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 