On Monday, Senator McConnell praised a toothless statement from Prime Minister Maliki:

“I welcome the news that Iraqi leaders have taken steps to reach consensus on issues critical to the stability and future governance of Iraq. In the past few weeks we’ve heard reports from Iraq that our brave troops are succeeding in providing the security that General Petraeus’ mission was designed to provide. Iraqi leaders must take this opportunity to make tough decisions like the ones they made yesterday.”

One would have been either desperate and dishonest or hopelessly naive to think that the "news" praised by McConnell was meaningful. As expected, it has turned out to be theater arranged by Maliki to influence the American political debate:

So once again, even if the politicians were acting in good faith, it's not at all clear that they speak for the armed men who can veto any high-level compromise. The agreement may give Ambassador Crocker some rare and much-needed good news to highlight when he delivers his surge status report to Congress next month. But, as a senior American military official said earlier this month, "it is going to require some sustained effort and inspired political leadership to overcome the hostility and hate and mistrust that's grown up around the political structure here in Iraq."

As Ilan Goldenberg noted on Tuesday, there's a pattern here. We get a detail-free, jubilant announcement of progress on political reconciliation from Maliki, followed by a brief cascade of celebratory onanism in the conservative media. Then the details emerge, the agreement is more death rattle than cause for cigars, and it dies in the Iraqi parliament, with the American press absent at the wake. It happened with a purported compromise on an oil law in July, just before President Bush was required to submit a report on progress on political benchmarks, and it's happening again. And our senior Senator is happy to exploit it.