I wish I'd posted this a few days ago. Too late now ...
Today President Bush is meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Presumably President Bush is getting information about what al-Maliki will do next to solve Iraq's many problems. In practice, from what I know of Bush, he will be telling al-Maliki what to do next to solve Iraq's many problems. Of course, Bush's own record in this arena is not something to be particularly proud of; but, after all, who's in charge here?
Al-Maliki is himself in a tough position. Moqtada al-Sadr, arguably the most powerful Shiite (and therefore the most powerful figure) in Iraq today — he apparently has the largest single voting bloc in parliament, through his followers controls four key government ministries, and apparently is responsible for propping up al-Maliki — apparently told al-Maliki that if he went ahead with his meeting with Bush, which he has done, al-Sadr would pull his people out of the government. This, of course, put al-Maliki between a rock and a hard place: go ahead with the meeting with Bush and lose his keystone of support in the government, or cancel the meeting with Bush and demonstrate that he was nothing but al-Sadr's puppet.
There was a solution to this problem, of course. Laura Bush could have come down with a really bad cold, forcing the president of the United States himself to cancel the meeting. This would, of course, only have been a temporary solution to al-Maliki's problem, but it would at least have given him a little time to shore up his support at home.
But, of course, it didn't happen; Bush went ahead with the meeting despite the obvious damage to al-Maliki (that Bush goes to Jordan to meet with al-Maliki not only gives his own base something to grab hold of, but also gets him out of a United States turned annoyingly hostile to his Iraq adventure). But I still think it would have been a good deed — now missed.