Security first.(AT WAR)

OUR position in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. The civil war has worsened. The Sunni insurgency in Anbar is as strong as ever. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki demonstrates almost daily his dependence on the anti-American thug Moqtada al-Sadr. His government continues to be corrupt and ineffectual. Meanwhile, here at home support for the war steadily sags, and, contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is conceivable that Democrats will agitate to cut off funding for the war should we continue on our downward slide in Iraq.

At this moment of crisis, Washington has turned to a bout of wishful thinking dressed up by a bipartisan commission and the presence of Bush-family fixer James A. Baker III. The Jim Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group is reportedly going to recommend that the Bush administration talk to Syria and Iran as a way to ease our trouble in Iraq. This idea is less realpolitik than childishness. Syria and Iran have no incentive to help us in Iraq, where they are fomenting the violence. So long as we are losing there, we have zero leverage. The only possible reason they could have to cooperate, or pretend to cooperate, with us would be to get us to surrender our strategic position in the region entirely by implicitly blessing a Syrian reoccupation of Lebanon, or Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon.

But such is the political and media momentum behind the Baker-Hamilton commission, and the weakened state of a President Bush fresh from his electoral "thumping," that Bush would be hard-pressed to ignore the commission's recommendations. He may at least have to engage in some sort of window-dressing dialogue with Syria and Iran--knowing it will go nowhere--at the same time he plays up, for his purposes, the commission's likely recommendation that we not cut and run from Iraq. This will provide Bush what might be his last chance to create progress on the ground in Iraq before domestic political support for the war crumbles entirely.

The linchpin in Iraq continues to be Baghdad. Our latest attempt to secure the city predictably failed for want of U.S. troops. Again and again in Iraq, our troops have cleared areas of insurgents, only to have them return when the troops vacate the areas or hand them over to incompetent Iraqi security forces. This is what just happened in ...