U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid gives it just four to six months before Baghdad is lost to sectarian violence - if circumstances don't change.

Yet how can circumstances change? The White House is victim to its own past lies and exaggerations.

It might not be too late to save Iraq from self-inflicted sectarian immolation. Yet there's no hope if U.S. officials continue to fall back on the fiction that Iraq faces mostly external terrorist enemies and that just a little military tweaking will yield short-term success and a hand-over to Iraqi troops.

That's just not happening.

Despite billions of dollars in training, equipment and weaponry, despite 130,000 fielded Iraqi troops and 91 battalions "in the lead," not a single Iraqi combat battalion can yet operate without imbedded U.S. advisers, Abizaid admits.

Even the best-case scenario for Iraq requires years of an American security umbrella - and is predicated on an Iraqi appetite for real democratic reforms that has yet to materialize.

Yet time is running out. The lies already have corroded trust. That's why the voters handed Republicans such a searing loss Nov. 7. And that's why precipitous withdrawal from Iraq remains the most likely political outcome, no matter what truths might emerge that point the other way.

This is the moment when U.S. politicians and senior military tacticians should be promoting truth.

Instead, they remain ensnared by past omissions and hopeful rhetoric that continue to thwart rational military planning.

President Bush still promotes the fiction that all that ails Iraq are terrorists and extremists. Iraq "is an important part of defeating the radicals and totalitarians that can't stand the emergence of a democracy," he said in Estonia this week.

Yet that Iraq democracy actually is a plutocracy of petty sectarian crime bosses using their offices to collect spoils, sponsor death squads, thwart moderate compromise and promote narrow sectarian agendas. The wreath of essential reforms - amnesty, constitutional revisions to preserve Iraq as an intact nation, Sunni power-sharing, the rule of law and police reforms, oil-revenue sharing and military units based on professionalism not sectarian identity - languish on the back burner.

Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki may well be a nice fellow crossed up by his unruly coalition partners, as U.S. officials suggest. He is bucking strongly negative domestic opinion if he goes ahead and meets with President Bush, possibly today in Jordan.

Yet al-Maliki also is a politician trying to hold on to his job. In recent weeks, he has flirted with dangerous populist positions that included barring U.S. attempts to hunt for a missing U.S. soldier, threatening arrest of a key Sunni politician and trying to curtail U.S. military command flexibility.

In Washington, the lack of clear political direction hamstrings military planning.

Abizaid's current "plan," as enunciated to the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago - to feed more U.S. advisers into Iraqi combat formations - amounts to a fatal shuffling of the deck chairs. By his own admission, Abizaid doesn't even have enough U.S. troops to secure Anbar province, the gateway to terrorist infiltration and resupply and already the scene of hundreds of Marine deaths. He doesn't have them in Iraq, and he doesn't have them elsewhere. Barring a draft, the cupboard is bare.

Yet his solution is a reductio ad absurdum - if you don't have enough troops yourself, create someone else's army.

In a devastating Nov. 28 critique of U.S. efforts to train Iraqi troops, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes that much of what's being reported publicly "grossly exaggerates progress, ignores or understates real-world problems and promises unrealistic timelines."

Without a viable government and political compromises, Iraqi military forces will never rise above a sectarian agenda. And as fast as Washington funnels in weaponry, it runs the risk that the guns and tanks and armor eventually will be turned against one group or another in an ever more ferocious civil war.

Elizabeth Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

© 2006 cleveland.com

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