General David Petraeus' testimony Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be another chapter in U.S. foreign policy's long-running "is the surge working?" debate. The General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will offer up some good news counterpoints to the not-so-good news out of Basra from the last weekend of March. But in the ways that matter, there's no need to debate in the present tense -- the surge isn't working, it's already worked, and the question is what the Democrats plan to do about it.

To evaluate the surge, you have to consider its goals. Peter Feaver, who spent years working on the National Security Council on Iraq issues as a specialist on domestic public opinion, has explained in Commentary the administration's desire "to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush's successor." Or as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden less charitably put it there's no plan at all other than "to muddle through and hand the problem off to his successor."

What is the end game? We have made it absolutely clear to the Iraqis that they don't have a blank check to delay their reconciliation. Yet ... we're offering them a blank check, are we not?

I think there are no good choices here, that our invasion unleashed forces that will have to play themselves out. Best thing we can do, I think, is to withdraw to enclaves and set up refugee zones, and let the violence play itself out. And offer passports to all Iraqis who helped us, and who would certainly be killed for that after we left. Not a good response, I know. But we cannot keep this status quo up indefinitely. One way or another, the blood of Iraqis will stain our nation. If I thought staying there indefinitely was not only possible, but would fix the problem and redeem our invasion, I would support it. But I just can't see that happening.

For the past year, the GOP has laid the groundwork to enlist Petraeus as its standard-bearer in the fairly likely event that the party loses in November to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. You read it here first. Plant your lawn signs now. Petraeus 2012: Surging to the White House.

In the event of a Republican loss in November, the party will have to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The most politically advantageous way of doing that will be to draft a symbol of the Iraq war as it might have been: engineered and executed not by the hidebound ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration, but by a nimble, dexterous warrior-scholar. It's true that John McCain has made the surgenik critique of the war for a long time. But it's a whole new political world when articulated by the man responsible -- in the media's imagination, at least -- with the war's belated redemption.

In recent weeks, the purported success of the surge strategy has been called into question, due to the rise of sectarian fighting with the Mahdi militia of Moqtada al-Sadr (an army also known as JAM) clashing with the Iraqi military. Before those battles occurred, Petraeus himself noted that the overall decline in violence (which in late 2007 dipped to 2005 levels) had not been accompanied by success on the political front: "No one feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation." And on Tuesday, senior Army and Marines Corps leaders told Congress that the surge of troops in Iraq has placed unsustainable stress on the U.S. military and rendered it less able to handle other conflicts. Yet Petraeus is not expected to provide Congress with testimony that will inconvenience the Bush administration or undermine its arguments for staying the course in Iraq. And there's no telling if members of Congress—including Democrats—will give Petraeus a more thorough grilling than he received in September, given that most members of Congress appear to have concluded that the House and the Senate cannot do much to slow or reverse Bush's war in Iraq.

The fighting in Basra and Baghdad is, on one level, about asserting the control of the central government. That is a good thing. But two, on another level, the fighting that took place last week was about ISCI trying to set the stage for this fall's provincial elections. It wasn't about the central government versus local authorities at all -- it was about cold-blooded intra-Shia politics.

Do we have a dog in such a fight? Alas, we do. That dog's name is ISCI. As the same friend mentioned above has noted, historians studying Iraq decades from now will wonder why the United States allied itself with the Iran-backed ISCI instead of the popularly-supported Sadr movement. (Hint to those historians: it's because they dress well and speak English. This is what happens when you send smart but young Republican loyalists -- who only speak English -- to help run the CPA in Baghdad.) Once again, we have backed the loser