Nah gonna happen...

I agree with Atrios, who speaks of the recurring Friedman Units here. There is a meme emerging which seems to be coming close to reaching conventional wisdom status that says that we'll reach some sort of conclusion on the effectiveness of the "surge" long about September, and at that point it will become abundantly clear that we are either:

winning....in which case we'll wrap this baby up toot sweet, or
losing....in which case we'll pack up and call it an honest day's work, leaving the brown folks to their (now definitively) inevitable chaos, carnage, civil war, etc.

Under this scenario, the surge will clear up the muddle that we face today, and General Petraeus, our latest deus ex machina, will let us know at that point how we did. The problem is that this magical and inherently ridiculous thinking has skipped out of the minds of the proud 28% that still supports the boy king, and has risen to the next level of experts that dominate the Sunday talk shows.

It's hard to explain just how wrong this thought process is. We won't even have the troops that we committed to the surge fully deployed until June at the earliest. From a practical standpoint, it would be virtually impossible to determine whether any pacification of the current fighting would represent progress, or some variation of al Sadr's recent passive aggressive tactic of withdrawing from his stronghold to allow the Americans to do his dirty work in purging his Sunni adversaries. Take that as a criticism of the idea of timetables in general, but the reality is that it would be nearly impossible to make a definitive evaluation as soon as the fall.

But the real flaw in the thinking, as Atrios points out, is that it is pure fantasy to think that Bush would be at all swayed by a negative outcome to conclude that it was time to take his toys and go home. He's in this thing until January 2009, when he'll slink from Washington back to Crawford. Like a drunken gambler who has doubled down over and over again, in Bush's mind any change in his current policy equals defeat, and nobody ever forget that. Add to that the dynamics of an emerging presidential election, where Republican candidates will be falling over themselves to prove their allah bashing bona fides, and you can darn well be sure that September won't look any different than May does.

Update: Talk Left picks up the meme.


Update 2: That didn't take long.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

"What I am trying to do is to get until April so we can decide whether to keep it going or not," he said in an interview in Baghdad last week. "Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."