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Democrats may take the fall |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 09/13/07 06:24 PM [ET] |
University of Michigan Professor and Middle East blogger Juan Cole has a sobering take on the Petraeus hearings and what’s coming for the Democrats. The upshot is that while Cole believes Petraeus’s shot at anything like success in Iraq (let’s call success a general cooling of ethnic tensions and mass violence) is a long shot, he believes it would be in the Dems’ political interests to let him keep trying with his surge forces for as much of the next 18 months as possible.
The thinking comes down to a mix of numbers, troop strength and the calendar.
Given the stabilization of Republican support for the war, there’s not a lot the Democrats can do to force the president to end the war during his term. Even if you assume heroic budgetary battles, there’s just not enough time left. Even the most aggressive timetables for withdrawal would take upwards of a year to execute. And Bush is down to 18 months.
So it’s not a matter of waiting out the clock for Bush. The window on forcing the president’s hand has pretty much closed.
But if President Bush can keep us in Iraq for the next 18 months, there’s probably not any president who can keep us there at our present strength much longer than that.
Add to that the fact that Cole believes that all hell really will break loose once U.S. troops leave — a not improbable assumption — and you come up with the conclusion that a Democratic president will in all likelihood come into office in early 2009 just in time to oversee Iraq’s full descent into anarchy.
Not that it’s not pretty anarchic already. It’s just that a lot of chaos we’ve sown will only be fully realized when we leave — kind of like how you don’t fully realize or lock in investment losses until you have to sell the stocks at a fraction of what you bought them for. Until then you can always pretend the value is going to rebound.
I’m not sure I fully agree with Cole’s implicit assumptions about how the domestic U.S. politics play out. But he’s certainly right that the Republicans, conservatives and especially various characterologically malformed neoconservatives will blame on the party in power in 2009 (most likely the Democrats) the outcomes that Bush’s fiasco have already made inevitable.
Thus the central Bush policy aim of making this mess someone else’s problem. The Dems play the role of the one of Pop’s business associates who comes in and buys W’s failed company out just in time for it to crash and burn.
But if the worst happens and the bottom does fall out, will the Dems really “own” the war after January 2009? I’m not so sure. First, people aren’t stupid, as much as partisans on both sides of the aisle might say they are. Second, not everything is Vietnam. As a very wise guy once said: History never repeats itself. It only appears to to those who don’t know the details.
One of the many ways that Vietnam was unique was that the Democrats were in key respects both the party that got the country into the war and also the party that helped force it out. It thus became imbued (or tainted, depending on your viewpoint) with the culture of anti-war protest.
But the late 1960s and early 1970s were a unique period in our national history. People, I believe, tend to lose track of the profound cultural (countercultural) dimension of the anti-war movement. And there is simply nothing comparable today — to the disgust and disappointment of some in the anti-war community. Opposition to the Iraq war is a profoundly mainstream position. And seldom, very seldom, has a war been so bought, conceived of, planned, voted for and everything else by one administration and one political party.
I understand that there’s a lot of very bitter disappointment among the Democrats over ending the war (or failing to do so). I agree with some of it. But I doubt much of anything that happens from this point will efface, wash away or even substantially diminish the central fact that this is on George W. Bush’s moral and political dime, and sustained from day one till today by the Republican Party.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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