Republican senator Lindsay Graham, last heard from on the subject of relaxing one’s expectations for Iraq, slipped the leash and found his way to a television studio again. He took the opportunity to allow as how he hopes that vacationing Iraqi legislators “will get an earful” from their constituents about the disappointing political situation in Iraq, apparently on the assumption that the lawmakers will be out dodging car bombs, insurgents or death squads, depending on the neighborhood, to see how the proles are enjoying life.

Graham also reiterated to Wolf Blitzer that his expectations for The Surge remain exceeded. This was yesterday, before the news that violence claimed more Iraqi civilian lives in July — more than 1,600 — than in February, when The Surge was inaugurated, and before the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc announced that it was pulling out of the government and that its ministers, including a deputy prime minister, were resigning. It’s unlikely, though, that either item would influence Graham’s assessment even though he acknowledges that “all the military might in the world is not going to win in Iraq until the Iraqi political leaders reconcile their country.” (Although one has to think that maybe all the military might in the world would win, if it was arrayed on one side; it’s just that overextended portion of it that we can bring to bear won’t.)

So the situation now is that when the parliament reconvenes in September, they will not only not have resolved any of the legislative conflicts the Bush administration insists they must, but they’ll actually be farther from doing so than they were when they left, which was close to as far as could be. And when General Petraeus, who is the current reigning Daddy figure for Graham and everyone else who can’t bring themselves to take responsibility for their own thinking on Iraq, makes his September report on the progress of The Surge, his acolytes will find themselves insisting that even though the political situation in Iraq is actually worse than it was before The Surge began, The Surge has succeeded so well in creating an improved security environment in which political progress is theoretically possible that we cannot possibly afford to interfere with it.

Of course the obvious solution to the problem is the one that many Democrats and a few Republicans now favor— pull out enough troops so that the insurgents and militias have more or less free reign, but not so many that we cease to be a provocatively occupying power. And continuing giving guns to everyone.

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