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An equally big lie is the administration's constant claim that it is on the same page as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as we go full speed ahead. Only last month Mr. Maliki told The Wall Street Journal that he wished he "could be done with" his role as Iraq's leader "before the end of this term." Now we are asked to believe not merely that he is a strongman capable of vanquishing the death squads of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, his political ally, but also that he can be trusted to produce the troops he failed to supply in last year's failed Baghdad crackdown. Yet as recently as November, there still wasn't a single Iraqi battalion capable of fighting on its own.
Hardly a day passes without Mr. Maliki mocking the White House's professed faith in him. In the past week or so alone, he has presided over a second botched hanging (despite delaying it for more than two weeks to put in place new guidelines), charged Condi Rice with giving a "morale boost to the terrorists" because she criticized him, and overruled American objections to appoint an obscure commander from deep in Shiite territory to run the Baghdad "surge." His government doesn't even try to hide its greater allegiance to Iran. Mr. Maliki's foreign minister has asked for the release of the five Iranians detained in an American raid on an Iranian office in northern Iraq this month and, on Monday, called for setting up more Iranian "consulates" in Iraq.
The president's pretense that Mr. Maliki and his inept, ill-equipped, militia-infiltrated security forces can advance American interests in this war is Neville Chamberlain-like in its naiveté and disingenuousness. An American military official in Baghdad read the writing on the wall to The Times last week: "We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem. We are being played like a pawn." That's why the most destructive lie of all may be the White House's constant refrain that its doomed strategy is the only one anyone has proposed. Administration critics, Mr. Cheney said last Sunday, "have absolutely nothing to offer in its place," as if the Iraq Study Group, John Murtha and Joseph Biden-Leslie Gelb plans, among others, didn't predate the White House's own.
In reality we're learning piece by piece that it is the White House that has no plan. Ms. Rice has now downsized the surge/escalation into an "augmentation," inadvertently divulging how the Pentagon is improvising, juggling small deployments in fits and starts. No one can plausibly explain how a parallel chain of command sending American and Iraqi troops into urban street combat side by side will work with Iraqis in the lead (it will report to a "committee" led by Mr. Maliki!). Or how $1 billion in new American reconstruction spending will accomplish what the $30 billion thrown down the drain in previous reconstruction spending did not.
All of this replays 2003, when the White House refused to consider any plan, including existing ones in the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, for coping with a broken post-Saddam Iraq. Then, as at every stage of the war since, the only administration plan was for a propaganda campaign to bamboozle American voters into believing "victory" was just around the corner.
The next push on the "way forward" propaganda campaign arrives Tuesday night, with the State of the Union address.
The good news is that the Democrats have chosen Jim Webb, the new Virginia senator, to give their official response. Mr. Webb, a Reagan administration Navy secretary and the father of a son serving in Iraq, has already provoked a testy exchange about the war with the president at a White House reception for freshmen in Congress. He's the kind of guy likely to keep a scorecard of the lies on Tuesday night. But whether he does or not, it's incumbent on all those talking heads who fell for "shock and awe" and "Mission Accomplished" in 2003 to not let history repeat itself in 2007. Facing the truth is the only way forward in Iraq.
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