kicking the can six months further

Eugene Robinson nails it:

The next six months in Iraq are crucial -- and always will be

Yes indeed. The administration isn't trying to win the war; thet;re trying to win the game. Playing out the clock until Bush can hand it off to the next guy and leave, puffing out his chest and taking credit for "not losing" and blaming the loss of "victory" on his successor.

It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments.

As he points out, the "new strategy" is opposed to the old one: making deals with local warlords, mostly Sunni, instead of banking on and supporting the central government, which is of course Shiite.

Petraeus did everything he could to encourage this trend, pouring largess into Anbar to forge new relationships with warlords who used to be bitter enemies. Once the local Sunni leaders decided -- for now -- that they would rather work with the Americans than shoot at them, attacks on U.S. forces in the province fell sharply.

However, this works directly against the "strategy" of counting on the central government in Baghdad to work everything out. Maliki initially reacted with alarm at seeing the Americans strengthen the hand of the Sunnis in Anbar.

But as Robinson says, it'll do the trick in the short term.

On with the new new strategy, which is to bypass the national government and work from the bottom up, making deals with local power brokers. That should be good for, what, another six months?