Postponing

I don't know if it was because of the leaked memo from Steven Hadley expressing displeasure with Prime Minister Maliki's ability to govern and where his loyalties lie ("The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action"), or all of the US officials blaming Iraqis for the continuing violence (now there's some passing the buck for you), or the 35 loyalists to Muqtada al-Sadr quitting the government in reaction to the Bush-Maliki upcoming meeting. But whatever the reason, the meeting has been postponed by a day.

President Bush's high-stakes summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was put off Wednesday after public disclosure of U.S. doubts about his capacity to control sectarian warfare. The White House said the two leaders would meet on Thursday.

There's obviously some serious damage control going on both sides of this divide. Look at this ridiculous justification o' the day:

White House counselor Dan Bartlett denied that the move was a snub by al-Maliki or was related to the leak of a White House memo questioning the prime minister's capacity for controlling violence in Iraq.

"Absolutely not," Bartlett said." He said the king and the prime minister had met before Bush arrived from a NATO summit in Latvia. "It negated the purpose for a meeting of the three of them," Bartlett said.

Bartlett said that Wednesday night's three-way meeting had always been planned as "more of a social meeting" and that Bush and Maliki on Thursday would have a "robust" meeting on their own.

"What up, King Abdi? How're your kids? Bears were playin' well til' last Sunday, weren't they? Yo, Maliki, you been working out?"

I would say that circumstances on the ground have changed in advance of this meeting. Probably no more so than by Saudi Arabia's public insistence that they would protect Sunnis if the United States left the Shiites to their own devises:

In February 2003, a month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warned President Bush that he would be "solving one problem and creating five more" if he removed Saddam Hussein by force. Had Bush heeded his advice, Iraq would not now be on the brink of full-blown civil war and disintegration.

One hopes he won't make the same mistake again by ignoring the counsel of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said in a speech last month that "since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.

I'm assuming that President Cheney got this message when he was summoned to Saudi Arabia over the weekend. Until then, Laura Rozen has been reporting that the US may have been looking to pick a side in the civil war, in the hopes that it would meet a swift end and at least get back to a measure of stability. The Saudi's threat to make it a wider war if that happened tosses that scenario out the window. And so maybe there needed to be a day of rethinking.

Or maybe the boycott of Sadr's loyalists from the government, which may leave Maliki without a governing coalition, caused the delay, although I don't know what could be done to manage this outside of an outright cancellation. As clammyc reported today, these 30 legislators represent a quarter of the governing coalition. If a no-confidence vote were held right now, wouldn't Maliki lose and be forced to call new elections? Perhaps the Bush Administration, unhappy with the Maliki government, would welcome this. But surely they recognize that the successor would likely be somebody even more loyal to Sadr or perhaps Sadr himself, who is simultaneously being defended by US forces and shooting at them?

There are no easy answers in the entire war, yet alone the outcome of this meeting and its delay. But clearly we have an Administration that literally has no idea what to do or which way to turn, and has been indeed "postponing" the inevitable for going on two years. So maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Update: Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report notes that the al-Sadr bloc only suspended their participation in the government. If they actually pulled out, the unity government would collapse. They still have a move to play yet.