NOT WISE.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq war)

On March 26, 1968, Lyndon Johnson met in the Cabinet Room at the White House with a group of elder statesmen and retired generals known collectively as the Wise Men. He wanted their advice on what to do in Vietnam. They were the architects of American foreign policy in the Cold War, and they included Democrats and Republicans. Johnson had sought their counsel before, and they had always told him that he should stand firm. But Clark Clifford, who had recently replaced Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, found that this time, two months after the Tet Offensive, with public confidence beginning to break, most of the Wise Men, including Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy, both anti-Communist hawks, had changed their minds. They told Johnson that the war could not be won in the time that American opinion would permit him, and that the United States should begin to disengage from Vietnam. Five days later, Johnson announced a restriction on bombing in North Vietnam and his own withdrawal from the Presidential race.

If there are any Wise Men available in the spring of 2006, what should they tell President Bush to do in Iraq? And, if they told him, would he listen? The government is in a strange and prolonged state of paralysis. Many officials in the Administration now admit, privately, and after years of willful blindness, that the war, in which almost twenty-four hundred Americans have died, and whose cumulative cost will reach $320 billion this year, is going badly and shows no prospect of a quick turnaround. Asked why the President doesn't take this or that step to try to salvage what will become his legacy--fire his Secretary of Defense, for example--they drop their heads, as if to say: We know, he should, but it's not going to happen. At the same time, they can't quite bring themselves to abandon hope for a miracle.

Last week, hope took the unlikely shape of a hard-line Shiite politician named Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who was finally named Prime Minister of the permanent government in Baghdad, more than four months after it was elected. He is a compromise candidate among Iraq's warring groups, which include two opposing factions within what is still called the Shiite alliance. If he inspires any confidence here, it is because no one knows anything about him. The idea is that Iraq, which an Iraqi official recently described as "a country near death," will somehow begin to consolidate around the government of Prime Minister Maliki, and the violence will somehow begin to subside. As a strategy, this amounts to muddling through the rest of the Bush Presidency, without being forced to admit defeat, until January of 2009, when the war will become a new President's problem.

Since the end of the Cold War, the role of the foreign-policy establishment has been killed off by the nasty partisanship that now infects every aspect of Washington politics. In mid-March, Congress announced the formation of an Iraq Study Group to analyze the state of the war and advise the President about the way forward. Perhaps because the very idea of a bipartisan foreign policy no longer exists, the group seems to have been chosen for its political constituencies rather than for its informed and independent judgment. It's hard to imagine the likes of Rudolph Giuliani, Chuck ...