What’s best we can hope for in Iraq?

It’s September, the long-awaited Month of Decision on the Iraq war, and all parties with a career stake in the outcome have swung into action.

Pretty, perky Katie Couric took her “CBS Evening News” program to Iraq, and who turned up? Why, President Bush! What a coincidence that America’s least-popular president and lowest-rated network news anchor showed up simultaneously at a U.S. airbase in convenient Anbar province.

Walking in Baghdad with Gen. David Petraeus, Couric displayed the journalistic rigor of a cheerleader interviewing the football captain. She all but asked to feel his muscles. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that the Dora market, where Petraeus escorts visiting celebrities on flak-jacketed tours before whisking them off to dine on lobster tortellini and steak at the U.S. Embassy, is basically a U.S.-financed movie set — patrolled by heavily armored Humvees and kept in business by $2,500 cash grants to shopkeepers.

Serving a surf ‘n’ turf special in the Iraqi desert may eventually symbolize the entire doomed enterprise.

Even before Petraeus arrived back in Washington, however, he got upstaged by Osama bin Laden — the bearded psychopath who’s been the real brains behind American foreign policy since 9/11. Just before the 2004 presidential election, remember, the Al Qaeda leader delivered a videotaped fatwa denouncing Bush, for the transparent purpose of assuring his election. And why not? Under Bush, U.S. policy has faultlessly followed bin Laden’s blueprint for radicalizing Muslim youth from London to Islamabad.

Now, bin Laden, the David Koresh of the Middle East, speaks again. Oddly, he appears to have mistaken this September’s mummery for the real thing. Hasn’t he noticed that Bush fires generals who don’t tell him what he wants to hear? (Incidentally, do apprentice terrorists sit in coffee shops debating whether the Anointed One dyes his beard or is naturally virile like Ronald Reagan?)

Three things have long been obvious: Bush can’t admit error, Democrats can’t make him, and Petraeus would don his fanciest dress uniform and favor Congress with his celebrated impression of the late Ethel Merman: “Everything’s comin’ up roses!”

Apart from endorsing The Surge by chastising Democrats for not ending it, the exact purpose of the latest bin Laden videos, with their multiple audiences, can only be guessed at. Strategically, bin Laden must love The Surge. It keeps the Chicken Little faction of the Republican right pounding its collective chest while continuing to waste lives and treasure fighting the wrong enemy.

Last year, I pointed out that Al Qaeda governs no Islamic nation and poses “no military threat to the integrity of the United States or any Western nation. At worst, they’re capable of theatrical mass murder like the 9/11 attacks.”

What, then, is Petraeus’s game? With a Princeton Ph.D. and a reputation as a brilliant tactician, he surely realizes that getting sucked into a succession of Iraq-style guerilla wars from Morocco to Pakistan would play directly into Al Qaeda’s hands, with heaven knows what domestic political repercussions as the American empire founders. Maybe he sees himself as Kissinger to Bush’s Nixon, camouflaging tactical retreat by calling it a surge, buying time until reasoned leadership takes over in January 2009.

Realistically, that’s the best we can hope for.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].