You Call That the Center?

What's a middle-road approach to Iraq?

The White House would like you to believe the middle road is what President Bush will announce tonight from the Oval Office: The possible return to approximately pre-surge troop levels by sometime next summer.

A growing bipartisan movement on Capitol Hill would like you to believe the middle road is Congress agreeing on some modest, incremental, and in some cases non-binding limits on the president's policy.

But what's middle-road for the American public? A sizeable majority wants Bush to bring most of the 160,000 troops home from Iraq in about the same time frame that he is proposing to withdraw less than 30,000. According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, for instance, 55 percent of Americans support "legislation that would set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq by next spring."

On the antiwar extreme, some Americans want all U.S. troops of out Iraq right now; on the prowar extreme, some want those troops to stay indefinitely. But the consensus view is that Americans want out -- starting now, ending soon.

How, then, has the political debate in Washington become so skewed? Why is it so out of step with the will of the people?

One answer, of course, is that most Republican members of Congress are sticking with Bush. But a lot of the credit belongs to the White House, for a public-relations push that flooded the zone starting in early August.

The emphatic and persistent White House message about nominal military successes in Iraq, culminating with Gen. David Petraeus's congressional testimony this week, dominated the airwaves and shifted the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom about Iraq policy -- while not, interestingly enough, diminishing the public's desire to get the hell out one bit.

Bush's Notion of 'Common Ground'

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Steven Lee Myers write in the New York Times: "When top Democratic leaders visited him at the White House this week, President Bush told them he wanted to 'find common ground' on Iraq. But when the president said he planned to 'start doing some redeployment,' the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, cut him off.

"'No you're not, Mr. President,' Ms. Pelosi interjected. 'You're just going back to the presurge level.'

"The testy exchange, recounted by three people who attended the session or were briefed on it, provides a peek into how Mr. Bush will try to sell Americans on his Iraq strategy when he addresses the nation at 9 p.m. Thursday. With lawmakers openly skeptical of his troop buildup, Mr. Bush will cast his plan for a gradual, limited withdrawal as a way to bring a divided America together -- even as he resists demands from those who want him to move much faster. . . .

"'We all made clear that merely bringing back the surge troops is no change in policy,' said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, who also attended the White House meeting. But he conceded that it could be tough for Democrats to force a change. 'We have the public behind us,' he said, 'but we don't have the votes in the Senate.'"