Michael Abramowitz fills in a few of the blanks in today’s WaPo as he reports Mr Bu$h is now a big fan of political compromise in Iraq, (but not in the US.)

Having won a two-month reprieve from Congress to demonstrate progress in Iraq, the White House does not intend to give up on trying to forge a grand political bargain among Iraq's sectarian leaders, even though such a deal has proved elusive since the 2003 invasion, administration officials said.

The officials said they hope to develop the framework through which competing factions can sort out their differences and enact a national oil law, pass legislation aimed at bringing ex-Baathists into the government and demonstrate progress on other measures aimed at achieving national reconciliation.

But the officials privately acknowledge that the Iraqi government probably will not fulfill all of those tasks, which are among the political goals Congress is demanding before a Sept. 15 deadline. Asking the Iraqi parliament to move such legislation by September, one senior administration official said, is a bit like asking the U.S. Congress to handle abortion, gun control and other hot-button issues in a matter of months.

As I’ve noted several times, the oil law is the only benchmark the Bu$h malAdministration is really interested in. In an effort to drag the Maliki government along to get this law passed, Mr Bu$h has taken to expanding his frequent hectoring video conferences with Prime Minister Maliki.

[A]dministration officials have taken in recent days to describing the benchmarks as imperfect indicators, saying a better gauge right now is political reconciliation in local areas. They are also playing up broader Iraqi and U.S. efforts at "top-down" reconciliation, such as strengthening the Presidency Council in Iraq, composed of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, Kurdish president Jalal Talabani and the two vice presidents, one a Shiite and the other a Sunni.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker told Congress on Thursday that the council is meeting weekly to deal with crises, and officials are hoping this will become a forum to develop consensus on broader political issues. Bush has taken to including the two vice presidents -- Adel Abdul Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi -- as well as Talabani in some of his regular video conferences with Maliki.

Bu$hCo is trying to develop a sense of cooperation among the various sects and political groups within the Parliament by making his weekly nagging video conferences more inclusive. I’m sure that having the rest of the Presidency Council see just how effective Mr Bu$h is at extemporaneous speaking will imbue them with a great deal of confidence.

Because there is an implicit commitment by the malAdministration to demonstrate a sense of achievement before September 15th, they are trying to force the Iraqi Parliament to cut short their one month vacation during August,

Prime Minister Mailiki has valiantly made the effort to get the Parliament to comply with Mr Bu$h’s demand:

Baghdad, Jul 21, (VOI) – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged parliament to cancel or shorten the summer recess so as to help the government solving some pending issues, including the filling of vacant ministerial portfolios.

"The political process has to proceed forward and the government has to work with parliament for the progress of the Iraqi people in these tough circumstances," according to a cabinet statement after Maliki met U.S. ambassador in Baghdad Ryan Crocker and U.S. National Security Council senior director for Iraq and the Middle East Megan O'Sullivan. The statement was received by the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

The Iraqi premier said there were several draft laws not referred yet for debate inside parliament because the quorum was not observed, the statement added.

The Iraqi parliament had decided to extend its work for a month, to end late July, so as to vote on about 50 important draft laws, like the constitution amendment committee and oil.

Some ministerial portfolios within the Iraqi government became vacant after the Sadrists, or Iraqis loyal to Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, withdrew in protest against the government's failure to come up with a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq. [emph added]

If the name Meghan O’Sullivan seems familiar to you that’s because she is one of the hot-shot 30-somethings who are going to remake the world.

Their adulthood has never included a fellow superpower or the need to reach accommodation with an enemy -- a Cold War concept none of the NSC's Gen-X crowd can get their heads around. Instead, their history begins with Sept. 11, 2001. It is the measuring stick they use when discussing their generation's challenge and the sole lens through which they envision the future. "We all built careers in the post-Cold War world," said Meghan O'Sullivan, who at 36 is the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. "You have to think about what are the defining features of the age we live in. For me, that's American primacy, globalization, terrorism and WMD, which is why we do what we do. This wasn't applicable during the Cold War."

The Vietnam war was waning just as O'Sullivan was becoming cognizant of the world, a kid in suburban Boston. Today, she is charged with guiding President Bush's strategy on Iraq after already having served as a senior adviser in Baghdad shaping the interim Iraqi government.

As I noted at the time:

Have the 30-something whiz kids… thought about fighting a military equal? Not according to this article. They’re still thinking about shocking and awing the towelheads in the oil countries. That’s land China (and her economic ally Japan) needs in the future to fuel its booming economy.

Primacy, like military power, whether tangible through projection, or intangible through merely existing, stems from economic power, and America has voluntarily offshored much of its power of production, sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. We don’t make our stuff, we buy it from other countries. And one of the primary factories we buy from is China. China currently holds about 20% of our national debt. This is one of the frightening facts of globalization. Our economy weakens when we become a debtor nation. Someone else holds our purse strings, ad they can close them.

Terrorism is a threat, in a sense. Yet, it’s been a threat since the 70s. Ask the Germans about the Baader-Meinhof gang. Ask the French about the OAS, and the pied-noirs of Algeria, who subverted 15% of the French Army. It was solved politically, and judicially, not by warfare.

And now Meghan O’Sullivan is going to straighten out the Iraqis, and get them to willingly sign away their wealth to the occupier. I’m just a silly old broke down sergeant, but I think Ms O’Sullivan is going to learn that resistance can take forms other than armed attacks.

It’s like herding cats to get an occupied country to give away their children’s inheritance.