A Consensus on Iraq

President Bush and Democrats say they want to find common ground on the war. They can.

WITH THE election over and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on his way out, both President Bush and leaders of the new Democratic congressional majority were talking about forging a bipartisan consensus on Iraq. But is consensus possible? The often polarized debate over the war, both before and during the campaign, might suggest that it's not. Yet a close look at what the White House and Democrats have been saying, along with what is emerging from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, offers grounds for some optimism. There is, in fact, a center to the war debate that offers the outlines of a way forward.

Start with what former Secretary of State James A. Baker III has said about the deliberations of the congressionally chartered study group, which will meet with Mr. Bush this week and deliver its report sometime after Thanksgiving. Judging from the public statements Mr. Baker has made so far, the panel won't propose an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, as the left wing of the Democratic Party favors. Nor will it endorse a U.S.-sponsored division of the country along ethnic lines, a proposal pushed in modified form by the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.).

The group will, however, almost certainly endorse an idea long favored by Mr. Biden and many other Democrats: an attempt by the United States to find common ground on Iraq with its neighbors -- including Syria and Iran. Though the Bush administration has resisted such an initiative, the newly designated defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, is likely to favor it. Forging a stronger international consensus on stabilizing and reconstructing Iraq, perhaps by staging a multinational conference, is one major option the Bush administration hasn't tried.

Beyond these basic parameters, much current discussion about Iraq boils down to how the United States might induce Iraqi leaders, starting with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to negotiate compromises among warring Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and to disarm ethnic militias. Some favor a peace conference like that which ended the Bosnian war; others want to announce timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals that they believe would force Iraqis to act. There are proposals for increasing aid to Iraqi reconstruction and linking it to progress on reconciliation or militia demobilization. The administration itself has been trying to get Mr. Maliki's agreement to an informal timetable for meeting certain benchmarks and threatening to curtail money for security forces if they don't reform.

What's clear from all this is that new steps could and should be taken to increase U.S. pressure for an Iraqi peace settlement. But a fresh strategy can't be limited to such measures. Both the Bush administration and Democrats must face the possibility that no amount of U.S. pushing will produce political results or diminish the violence in Baghdad, at least in the short term. For some time, Mr. Maliki and other Iraqis have been warning any American who will listen that the dynamics driving the war won't necessarily respond to timetables drawn up in Washington. If Iraq's civil war is like most others, the fighting might last years before a new order is established.

The United States needs a strategy for defending its own vital interests in that case. As it happens, Mr. Maliki has one to offer: In the last couple of weeks he has made clear that his government's priority is to gain full command over the Iraqi army the United States has been building and take the lead in fighting the Sunni-al-Qaeda insurgency. That means that U.S. troops could begin moving to a supporting role, backing up the Iraqi units with air power and rapid reaction forces. Rather than trying to pacify Baghdad and other cities -- an unwinnable battle in the near term -- more U.S. advisers would embed in Iraqi units, and the training and equipping of those units would be significantly stepped up.

Many Iraqis would welcome a U.S. policy aimed at letting the government and its army carry out the fight to stabilize the country while ensuring that it had the resources and support to prevail over time. That could be a course that Mr. Bush and the Democrats can agree on, as well.