For a taste of what's to come from the September Iraq update provided by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, take a look at what Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning. In video-conferenced testimony, the ambassador conceded that that Iraqi government is no "model of smoothly functioning efficiency" -- which, last week's benchmark report shows, is something of an understatement. Yet it's Crocker's job to prod the Iraqi government toward sectarian compromise and basic competence. What to do?

Crocker's answer: Look outside of Baghdad and to the provinces for the future of political compromise:

There's some rhetorical sleight of hand here. Crocker said that the decision among Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar Province to fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq alongside the U.S. meant that the Sunnis were allied with, "by extension, the Iraqi government." And there, that's not the case: the Anbar alliance against al-Qaeda is, by and large, opposed to the Maliki government, so much so that Prime Minister Maliki warned the U.S. against arming Sunni tribal fighters. (He had to take back his comments later.)

"Bottom-up" reconciliation, as Crocker would have it, would indeed be an encouraging sign in Iraq. But shifting away from al-Qaeda in Iraq doesn't necessarily indicate anything of the sort. Anbar, for instance, isn't a mixed province: it's an overwhelmingly Sunni one. And what's more, given that new national elections in Iraq won't happen until 2009, even if "bottom-up" reconciliation was taking place, it doesn't have an obvious way of influencing Baghdad. Crocker wasn't prepared to claim that the national government is irrelevant. But focusing on provincial developments -- especially when they don't actually indicate that much about cross-sectarian politics -- contains that implication, at least if the effort is taken in good faith. If it isn't, however, then "bottom-up" reconciliation is a euphemism for shifting the goalposts.