Pressure is growing in Washington for President George Bush to strike a deal with his domestic opponents over Iraq, writes Denis Staunton.
When the White House reports to Congress this week on political progress in Iraq since the "surge" in American combat forces began earlier this year, it will admit that the Iraqi government has met few, if any, of the political goals Washington set out for it. There is no agreement on how to share oil revenues, no relaxation of the de-Baathification laws that bar many Sunnis from senior positions and no constitutional changes to promote reconciliation between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds.
More than 3,600 American soldiers have died in a conflict that has now lasted longer than the United States' involvement in the second World War - more than 500 of them since the surge began. Seven out of 10 Americans want almost all of the 160,000 US troops in Iraq to come home by next April, according to a Gallup poll published yesterday, and 62 per cent say it was a mistake to send them there in the first place.
The war has long been unpopular but until this week President George Bush was secure in the support of most Republicans in Congress as he resisted Democratic calls to agree a timetable for withdrawal and pleaded for one last chance to establish a stable, friendly government in Baghdad.
This month's defections of key Republican senators, including Richard Lugar - his party's senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - and New Mexico's Pete Domenici, a long-standing Bush ally, took the White House by surprise and has reportedly thrown Bush's inner circle into a panic.
The White House has denied that there is an internal debate "right now on withdrawing forces right now", but even the neo-conservative remnant that supports the president's policy acknowledges Bush is under pressure to strike a "grand bargain" with his opponents.
As the Senate debates the war over the next two weeks, Democrats plan to force Republicans to vote on the president's strategy again and again, an uncomfortable prospect for Republican senators facing re-election next year. Among the Republicans who have already broken ranks with Bush, many - including Domenici, Maine's Susan Collins, New Hampshire's John Sununu and Tennessee's Lamar Alexander - face tough election battles in 2008.
Republican nervousness about the war is apparent in the House of Representatives too, where the party's congressmen are watching anxiously as Democratic challengers are already out-raising them in campaign contributions, partly on account of popular discontent with the continued presence of US troops in Iraq.
The White House insists that this week's report from Iraq will represent no more than a "snapshot" of the situation at the start of the surge, pointing out that the last of the 30,000 extra troops were only deployed two weeks ago. The administration is also seeking to play down expectations in advance of September's progress report from Gen David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq.
There is no sign that Bush will announce a change of course this week, but he used a speech in Cleveland yesterday to look ahead to the "post-surge strategy" after the enhanced deployment ends next spring. The surge cannot last beyond March or April because there are not enough troops to sustain it any longer under the current system of tour rotation, so Bush can confidently predict that troop numbers will fall thereafter.
If he succeeds in steadying his party's nerves until Congress goes on recess later this month, the president may buy time for his strategy until September's report from Gen Petraeus. Bush has warned, however, that the summer in Iraq could be bloody as US soldiers fight to clear and hold Baghdad and other urban areas.
Most legislators and policy analysts outside the White House now believe that the question is no longer if the US should withdraw from Iraq but when and how to redeploy American forces without exacerbating the civil war within the country and sparking further conflicts throughout the region.
Many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans are returning to the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which was co-chaired by Bush family consigliere James Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton. When the group published its report last December, the White House formally welcomed it but comprehensively rejected its key proposals - the withdrawal of most US combat troops by next March and the start of talks with Iraq's neighbours, including Iran and Syria.
Even the most passionate opponents of the war acknowledge that a precipitous US withdrawal could be followed by genocide in Iraq, with Iraqis who helped the Americans facing immediate danger.
Any withdrawal plan would have to include measures to safeguard US interests in the region - including the protection of the oil supply and the prevention of large-scale terrorist camps being established in Iraq.
For domestic as well as diplomatic reasons, Washington would seek to avoid any retreat from Iraq being perceived as a national humiliation similar to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Leaving Iraq would, however, become the most potent symbol of the failure of Bush's revolution in US foreign policy that followed the 9/11 attacks.
Nothing in Bush's record or personality suggests that he will voluntarily embrace a dramatic change of course in Iraq. Even if Congress forces the start of a withdrawal of US troops, it will be left to the next American president to deal with the broader consequences of this catastrophic military adventure.