Mr. Bush Alone

NYT Editorial

The difference between mainstream hawks and mainstream doves on Iraq seems to have boiled down to two months, with House Democrats now demanding visible progress by July while moderate Republicans are willing to give White House policies until September, but no longer, to show results.

Then there is President Bush, who has yet to acknowledge the reality that Congressional Republicans and even administration officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates now seem to tacitly accept. Three months into Mr. Bush’s troop escalation, there is no real security in Baghdad and no measurable progress toward reconciliation, while American public support for this folly has all but run out.

The really important question now facing Washington is the one Mr. Bush still refuses to address: how, while there is still some time left, to design an exit strategy that contains the chaos in Iraq and minimizes the damage to United States interests when American troops inevitably leave.

There was no shortage of reminders this week of how swiftly and thoroughly the political landscape has shifted against the war. Yesterday, the House voted to approve the next two months worth of war spending, linking further money to a progress report from the administration in July. On Tuesday, a delegation of Republican moderates went to the White House to warn Mr. Bush that they could not continue supporting his war beyond September unless conditions improved markedly.

As one participant, Representative Ray Lahood of Illinois, remarked later, “I don’t know if he’s gotten that kind of opinion before in such a frank and no-holds-barred way.” The session was all the more significant considering that less than two weeks had passed since the same Republican moderates voted to sustain Mr. Bush’s veto of a bill that set a March 2008 date for withdrawing American combat troops.

Yesterday brought Tony Blair’s announcement that he will step down as Britain’s prime minister next month. He chose to go out on a high note, after the formation of a new Northern Ireland government joining Sinn Fein with its fiercest Protestant foes. That is a historic achievement. But it cannot disguise the way Mr. Blair’s once boundless prospects and personal credibility imploded after he became Mr. Bush’s most articulate enabler on Iraq.

If Mr. Bush hopes to salvage anything from his 20 months left in office, and, more to the point, if he wants to play a constructive role in the accelerating Iraq endgame, he needs to understand how much has changed in this country, and how tragically little has changed in Iraq.

The American people are no longer willing to write blank checks of blood and treasure to an Iraqi government that has refused to stop rampaging Shiite militias, has failed to approve constitutional changes to bring estranged Sunni Arabs back into the political system, and has still not come up with a way to share oil revenues fairly. Now it wants to give itself a two-month summer vacation.

Mr. Bush needs to face up to this grim reality and abandon his fantasies of ultimate victory and vindication. Otherwise, he could find himself, and America’s best long-term interests, run over by a bipartisan rush toward the nearest exit.