The situation as it presently seems to play out is that Bush is pushing 'the surge' to give the Iraqi government the 'breathing space' necessary to make the big political agreements that will end the partisan fighting and turn to a unity solution for Iraq.
The deal the White House has been pushing for the last several months has been: give the 'surge' a chance to succeed. Give the Iraqis more time to work stuff out. Give more second chances out, and make sure we are behind vic-tor-ee.
The deadline on all of this keeps floating along; the White House doesn't want to force a put up or shut-up moment with the Iraqi government, because they don't have much traction over it or the Iraqi parliament. If such a deadline or any deadline were to come and go without the US doing their own put up or shut up (namely, withdrawing), they would have to admit that the war is lost and withdraw the Army as soon as they could, and Bush is not willing to lose - either the war or his face in the matter.
The one sentence in all of this that I utterly blank out is when some pundit says - "well, in that case, Bush must...". I've read or head this line a kazillion times, and it's always followed up with Bush not particularly giving a care as to what anyone outside the White House thought or did, because he's been able to bluff, stall, bamboozle and ignore any sort of restraints on him. Sometimes, I think you could impeach the man and remove him from office, and he'd just ignore it and stay put, and try to bluff you out of picking him up bodily and carrying him out the door of the White House.
So it doesn't matter what the outside world thinks unless the outside world has the guts to force the issue and carry it through.
Some folks in the last day or so are suggesting that Maliki, the present PM of Iraq, is totally unable or unwilling to get this sort of political Kumbayah together in Baghdad, and are now saying we should fire the dude, and replace him with someone else. My question on that is not if the PM is unwilling or unable; it's - who are you going to replace him with that can work out this mess sucessfully? And will they rule via a military coup, or be voted out by the Iraqi Majlis an-Nuwwab (Parliament)? And how many more months or years will Bushies yell that the New Guy Will Need to get situated, to clear his throat, to get something done? Not that he actually will, mind you...
My take is that most of the many factions in the Iraqi Parliament are interested in Being On Top Over The Other Guy, and see a Big Agreement as counter to that concept. It's not enough to their idea of personal benefit to render such a Big Agreement, and their opinion of all other groups are varying shades between The Bastards That Want To Do Us In, and The Bastards That We Can Work With For A While To Screw the Bigger Bastards. And even just getting a quorum of them to show up and vote is difficult...
So regardless of the degree of success that General Petraeus is having with 'the surge', it's not really affecting the political solution. The politicians there aren't interested in a Big Agreement. They're interested in power for whatever sub-faction they control. They can glare at each other and stock up their militia guys forever.
And the surge cannot be kept going much longer than next spring without the wheels falling off. Many years of trying to do forces on the cheap (one of Rummy's Big Ideas) and use only a few guys to go into the field is coming back to nail Bush. He doesn't have the manpower to keep the troop levels up in Iraq unless he keeps them there past 15 months per deployment (which was raised from 12 months only a couple of months ago) , strips someplace else of troops (say, Korea), or decides to bring a lot more Guard and Reserve troops over and keep them there.
Of course, enough of this and the stability of the troops starts to collapse. You already have a ton of PTSD cases; do this, and they go through the roof. More people crack and start shooting civilians, their fellow troopers, etc. The suicide rates will climb, along with bad conditions vis a vis their families at home.
This isn't counting the whole Iranian Fantasy that Cheney's office seems to have of spoiling for an opportunity to show those Iranian pussies who's the boss and bomb them into collapse on whatever pretext they can come up with. We could quite easily wake up one morning and find out that bombing waves were sent in against Iranian targets. My hope is that such an order would be met with the resignations of the Secretary of Defense and the Admiral in charge of Centcom who refused to take and give out that order. My fear is that by doing so, the coalition forces in Iraq would find themselves besieged by millions of very very angry Shi'a Iraqis, who would now consider the US Public Enemy Number One.
And the price of oil would instantly skyrocket as the entire Persian Gulf area became a war zone.
There are always options. Going for the really stupid ones aren't a good idea. The problem is that the people who want to go for the stupid options are the same ones who got us into this mess by - choosing earlier stupid options.