Gen. David Petraeus’ problem is that his war is happening in real time. Every word the U.S. commander in Iraq utters – every semicolon about a 45-day pause in troop withdrawals, every retort from a politician trying to burnish commander-in chief credentials – beams instantly to U.S. troops and adversaries overseas.

There is no time for a pause, either in expectations or reactions.

Iraq’s political instability may even be worse than before the “surge” started, as tribal factions angle for U.S. – and Iranian – arms. Iraq’s politicians, also known as tribal militia commanders, correctly read the U.S. mood as negative toward a long-term troop presence. So they’ve all embarked on their own narrow course of deal-making and revenge-taking to ensure survival.

That’s what the Basra firefight two weeks ago was all about.

Americans may like to think that U.S. and British artillery and ground forces saved Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki from the shame of mass defections from the Iraqi army after his ill-planned assault on Shiite militias loyal to renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. But what really was at stake – and appear to be succeeding – were al-Maliki’s efforts to isolate al-Sadr politically after Iranian allegiances may have shifted to another Shiite warlord.

That’s why Petraeus’ “conditions-based” approach is so dangerous. It reduces U.S. options to preserving the “still fragile” security status quo in Baghdad and makes U.S. policy hostage to Iraqi tribal tendencies, instead of taking advantage of them.

Petraeus is lucky in one thing: As long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, he can always cite good news. U.S. troops are the good news – the savviest weapon America wields on its battlefields, even when those battlefields are political rather than tactical. That’s why Petraeus couldn’t miss with his “surge,” at least in the short term.

Yet it’s also a strategic trap. If U.S. troops’ good news is the only good news that matters, it’s impossible to withdraw, or to plan for withdrawal.

Petraeus inadvertently revealed this Tuesday when he testified that the extra U.S. troops supposed to come home this summer can’t be spared from Iraq because their surge victory is so “fragile and reversible.”

In other words, U.S. troops must stay, either way – when conditions are grim, and when they start looking up.

This also suits the White House game plan of not wanting to make tough calls before President Bush leaves office next January. That way, the war’s manifest failures somehow will not belong to Bush 43 (dream on).

What this really does is paralyze U.S. policy-making and Pentagon war-making. It also ignores the ongoing strategic damage to U.S. combat arms.

In a nutshell, that’s what the dispute between Petraeus and his now-departed superior, Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, was all about. The two didn’t see eye to eye on whether Iraq is The War, or whether America has other wars to fight – which, of course, it does.

The 2003 attack on Iraq rested on a supertanker full of false assumptions and outright lies, but the one most relevant today is that it would be a short war, a blip soon erased from the strategic chessboard. That’s why Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused for years to order a permanent expansion of the Army.

Now it’s too late to avoid many of the adverse consequences of the repeat combat tours in stress on the troops and their families. But the problems soon will worsen, as the ability to face new threats or go after al-Qaida in redoubts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border suffers.

Petraeus is a smart man and a skilled military leader. He understands the complexities in Iraq. But a “conditions-based” approach narrows those complexities to this minute, this day or this week. It mutes the grays and fritters another opportunity to place Iraq policy within a larger strategic framework before another big real-time deadline.

That’s the one that comes next year, when a new president takes office with new short-term mandates that are likely to be as unreflective of reality as today’s.

Elizabeth Sullivan is foreign affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. E-mail [email protected].