In It To Win It... Win What?

So everyone got excited for about a half-hour that the Iraq Study Group would call for a pullback of troops and give the President cover to start to bring them home. Then the President stepped up to the podium in Jordan and shot that one down:

President Bush delivered a staunch endorsement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Thursday morning and dismissed calls for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq as unrealistic, following a summit meeting in which the two leaders discussed cracking down on sectarian violence and speeding the turnover of security responsibilities.

"He's the right guy for Iraq," Bush said an a news conference in the Jordanian capital, as he stood next to a somewhat stiff and unsmiling Iraqi premier.

Bush sought to preempt a growing clamor to start a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a policy shift advanced by the results of the Nov. 7 midterm elections and expected to be endorsed by a high-level commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.).

Although the president was not asked directly about the panel's recommendations, which will be made public next week but were partially leaked to reporters late Wednesday, he seemed to have the group in mind when he said: "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever."

Graceful exit? Damn right, it won't be graceful.

The President's been incredibly clear that he's not going to be the one who lost this war, and if we leave we lose, and so we're not leaving. Everything else is a shadow play. Short of a sit-in on the tarmacks of every US base around the world, American men and women will continue to be shipped to Iraq for no discernible reason, to play policeman in the middle of a civil war. And everybody knows it's a civil war, regardless of the hand-wringing on what to call it by the media.

We're not leaving Iraq until January 2009 at the earliest. Get everything else out of your head. The President is nothing if not consistent, and no unelected study group is going to tell him what to do. He's living in a complete fantasyland when it comes to Iraq, years after everybody else has understood the reality.

Bush is known for not telegraphing major policy changes in advance; he announced the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, for example, only days after saying Rumsfeld would stay until the end of his term. But the president's comments in Amman, coupled with other statements in the past few days, seemed to set firm lines on Iraq policy beyond which he would not be pushed.

These include no major troop withdrawals, no partition of the country and no direct talks with Iran and Syria as part of a broader diplomatic effort in the region. Bush pointedly dismissed the idea of splitting Iraq into parts according to ethnicity, saying it would only lead to more sectarian violence. His remarks, laced with familiar rhetoric, reiterated longstanding administration policies.

No direct talks. No withdrawal of troops. No partition. No changes. Stay the course.