You listened to the president’s speech. You’re mulling whether sending 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq will be the margin of victory or an ineffective gesture.

That’s a legitimate question. But among the serious problems that more troops in Iraq won’t fix is this:

Iraqi government officials practice one of the world’s most advanced forms of brinksmanship. They can get things done, but only after a deadline is set, and only after the deadline passes, and only after a new deadline is set, and only after — well, you get the idea.

Pick your metaphor. It appears they have to have their feet to the fire, or a freight train coming at them, or a baseball bat over their heads before they actually do something.

The times that great progress has been made in Iraq — the drafting of a constitution and the formation of a government are the two most important examples — have come after great bouts of brinksmanship. And here we are again, waiting for the Iraqis to come to agreement on key issues like security, oil revenues and power sharing.

The president is relying on “benchmarks,” that is, carefully defined achievement goals, to get the Iraqis to reach those agreements. Under this plan, the U.S. and Iraqi governments would work together to lay out and then achieve the goals.

It’s not new — the president has been talking about benchmarks for quite a while — but it seems to be the best idea at the moment to get the Iraqi government to solve some of its most intractable problems.

But the dilemma is this. If the Iraqis won’t do anything until they absolutely, absolutely have to, how does the U.S. convince them that they absolutely, absolutely have to?  In other words, how does the U.S. apply the ultimate pressure?

By threatening to leave.

But there’s a problem. For years, the message from President Bush has been that the U.S. is in Iraq for the long run. His supporters have spoken passionately about the disastrous consequences of a U.S. departure. At this point, Bush really can’t credibly threaten to leave.

So the Iraqis, assured that the Americans will keep supporting them, put off some very tough decisions.

Perhaps the best thing about being a reporter is that you sometimes get to ask a newsmaker a question that you, as a citizen, would really like to have answered.

And so it was that I got to ask the president the deadline question during a session with columnists in the Oval Office shortly before last November’s elections.

“Isn’t the big problem with the Iraqis that they’re so into brinksmanship, that the political breakthroughs we have are when we force deadlines on them, and that they let the deadlines pass and they wait until the train is about to hit them — “ I began.

“Yes,” the president answered.

“And when you say that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, they know you’re not going to abandon the central front in the war on terror? So they think, ‘Okay, well, we’ll wait a while.’”

“That’s that arc that Casey talks about,” Bush said.

Arc? Sometimes the president, in this case referring to the outgoing Iraq commander Gen. George Casey, speaks in a bit of an inner, arcane language. But as he continued, his dilemma became clear:

“How fast do you push?” he said. “Push them out without us, but if you push too fast, does it not achieve our objective?”

You can only push the Iraqis so much, the president continued; Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “doesn’t like it when he’s pushed too hard.”

And few Iraqis are familiar with the kind of government they are trying to create. “Part of this is a brand-new experience for these guys,” Bush said. “We are working through a lot of serious issues, kind of psychological issues with these folks, as well as what it means to actually build consensus. So it’s a relatively new experience for them.”

Bush talked about the period — the long period — between the elections in which Iraqis approved a new government and the actual establishment of that government.

“There’s nothing worse than to watch the government formation — we thought we had the government in, like, March, wasn’t it?” Bush said. “And then we got it in June. And it was just an agonizing period.”

Now, there has been more agonizing as the U.S. tries to prod the Iraqi government to make some of the decisions — like reaching an agreement on how to share oil money — that are extremely important to Iraq’s future.

But to really prod, we may have to threaten to go.

Yes, it’s true that’s a dangerous path. But we’re dealing with the world champions of brinksmanship.

Perhaps it’s time for a little brinksmanship of our own.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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