Bush's lame-duck status could impede foreign policy

President Bush seems ready to move back to Texas. There he was singing a jolly farewell at the Gridiron Club dinner recently, a fancy gathering for journalists and their big-shot sources. "Little Crawford looks the same, as I step down from the plane ...," crooned the president in a Washington ritual of self-deprecating humor. "That old White House ... is behind me. I am again carefree."

It's nice that Bush is comfortable with his "lame duck" status. But with 10 months left in his presidency, I don't think the rest of the country should be bursting into song. There are too many big foreign-policy problems. What's potentially dangerous is that in some foreign capitals, leaders are deciding to run out the clock on the Bush years, and wait to make what they hope will be a better deal with the next president.

Iran seems to be waiting out the lame-duck American president, too, hoping for a better deal down the road. That was one message of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's trip to Baghdad this month. By making his red-carpet visit to the nation that defines the Bush presidency, he was deliberately poking a finger in the president's eye. As Jimmy Carter can tell you, the Iranians like to humiliate U.S. presidents who are on their way out.

The Iranians probably won't go for broke to impose their will in Iraq this year, any more than the Syrians will in Lebanon. They will avoid a pitched battle in Bush's final months, betting that a Democratic president (or even John McCain) won't wage a new war to contain Tehran's hegemony in Iraq.

Here's where Barack Obama's promise to meet with any and all adversaries, which is right in principle, poses a problem in practice. Why should Iran, Syria or anyone else spend a nickel of political capital to reach an accommodation with this administration, when it can get an audience with President Obama for free?

The lame-duck sentiment is evident even among Iraqi officials, who you'd think would feel some gratitude toward a president who has spent $3 trillion on his Iraq makeover. Even Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who owes his political existence to Bush, is said to criticize him privately. "Maliki laughs at the U.S. government, and makes fun of the president as a fool who knows so little about the Middle East," an Iraqi Cabinet official told an American visitor recently.

There's a serious lame-duck problem ahead on Iraq -- one that should worry a prospective Democratic president as much as the Bush White House. That's the so-called "Strategic Framework Agreement" being negotiated between the United States and Iraq, which will provide legal authority for continued U.S. combat operations there after the current United Nations mandate expires at the end of this year.

Democrats have been yelping that this agreement is dangerous because it could bind the next administration to a continuation of Bush's policies. But that view is shortsighted. Even by Obama's and Hillary Clinton's most optimistic calculations, it will take at least a year to withdraw most U.S. combat troops -- and both Democrats have wisely talked about the likely need for a "residual force" in Iraq to hunt down al-Qaida terrorists. But without an agreement like what Bush is trying to negotiate, U.S. forces could have no legal authority to operate -- or protect themselves effectively during a withdrawal.

A security agreement with Iraq is one more foreign policy problem that can't wait for January 2009. But here's a prediction: Come this fall, the U.S. and Iraq will still be haggling over authority for future combat operations, with the U.S. election campaign making a permanent agreement all but impossible. Unless there's some bipartisan consensus on foreign policy (and the very idea seems inconceivable) then we may be worrying next year not about lame ducks, but dead ones.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group