The Dems’ Iraq Paralysis
- 03.13.2008 - 11:27 AMThe Democrats may call it “George Bush’s war,” but a new Pew Poll reveals that most Americans think we are going to win it. 53 percent of those polled said “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. Those who feel the war is going “very well” or “fairly well” have leaped from 30 percent about a year ago to 48 percent today. This new, widespread confidence in America’s Iraq effort presents a sizable problem for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom have used the “unpopular war” as a focal point.
Here is their unenviable task: to tell the American voter that his or her confidence in America’s ability to win at last is misplaced; to convince them what we need to do instead is pull our troops out and call for a troop surge in Afghanistan. Even more challenging for the Democrats is that time is not on their side. As recently as September 2007, only 42 percent of Americans believed the U.S. would succeed in Iraq. That number jumped 11 points in five months. The Democratic national convention is another five months away, and the benefits of the troop surge continue to mount. Just imagine the presidential nominee having to tell 64 percent of the country that they’re wrong about American victory.
The Democrats hitched their presidential hopes to a sense of national defeat that wasn’t sustained by circumstances. If there’s one thing every military expert will tell you, it’s that war is fluid. Defeatism does not allow for this fluidity. Once you declare a war lost, you’ve closed the door on the possibilities that arise with the changing nature of the fight and any potential innovations to capitalize on them. In this sense, defeatism is a practical handicap, whereas striving for victory necessarily depends upon the ability to adapt to a shifting landscape.
Enter John McCain. He recognized the failings of the Rumsfeld plan and, determined not to quit, pushed for new ideas. Having backed the Petraeus plan that’s responsible for the shift in Iraq, he doesn’t need to dance around the pro-victory majority—let alone convince them to throw in the towel. Seeing these new figures, the Democrats will at some point try to back off on the defeatist rhetoric, but there’s only so far they can go and not seem preposterous. A 180-degree turn on Iraq would create too much fallout about flip-flopping, experience, and character. It’s not clear how the Democrats are going to wriggle out of this one. But the man who changed when it most mattered can stay in one place for a while.
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March 13th, 2008 at 11:34 AM
” Just imagine the presidential nominee having to tell 64 percent of the country that they’re wrong about American victory.”
Bush did just that at the last one
March 13th, 2008 at 11:35 AM
Many good things may eventually come out of Iraq, but the time frame is critical. McCain needs just enough continuous good news over the next 7 months to get elected and then preside over the reconstruction of Iraq and its transformation into a major oil-producing nation, comparable to Saudi Arabia. This will take years, and clearly requires a pacification of the country, return of many Iraqi technocrats to run the oil and reconstruction industries, and a political arrangement among the 3 dominant groups that gives them all autonomy while sharing the oil revenue. This is a tall order and many bad things could happen.
If this vision comes to pass, the power structure of the Middle East will have been transformed in a historic way, and our oil dependency will not be as ruinous as it currently is, where the House of Saud and its terrorist minions are the main beneficiaries.
All of this may hinge on Petraeus and his reconstruction team, not politicians or any of us, so let’s hope.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:05 PM
Again, the fact that more Americans think the war is going better has not changed the fact that most Americans want to get out. Conservatives, who are happy to see money and lives wasted on the civil war in Iraq, are the ones who are out of touch here.
Add this to the recent spike in violence and we see that the situation remains much the same: America cannot “win” an Iraqi civil war, the surge has failed (since the political situation in Iraq has not improved, Iraq has no government, and civil war violence remains high). The question is, shall we find a way out of Iraq, like Clinton or Obama, or shall we stand with McCain, who insists that we should let Americans die for 100 years rather than admit we can’t “win?”
This is all part of conservatives’ inability to take the fight to our enemies: they would rather stay in Iraq fighting Iraqis (mistakenly identified as “Al-Qaeda” forgetting that AQI has little real connection to the people who attacked us on 9/11) than do what Obama would do, which is pull out of the Iraq civil war and take the fight to AQ.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:47 PM
T.B.
Even the article you link to has a poll showing that 65% of Americans believe “the United States have an obligation to establish a reasonable level of stability and security in Iraq before withdrawing all of its troops.” 32% disagree. And of those who support withdrawal only 30% want to “Withdraw troops as soon as possible” while 69% want to “set a timetable for gradual withdrawal.” Actually, there’s a treasure trove of heartening data in that story. For example when asked “In the long run, how do you think history will judge the U.S. invasion and subsequent involvement in Iraq?” the answer most Americans chose was “Mostly successful”.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:52 PM
In 1972, the Vietnam war had been going on a lot longer than the Iraq war, with many times the casualties, and a far greater degree of public opposition, including hostility to the draft. George McGovern ran as the clear antiwar candidate. Richard Nixon was the candidate of the status quo and carried 49 states. And Nixon had even less charisma than McCain.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:58 PM
69% want to “set a timetable for gradual withdrawal.”
Which McCain and Bush oppose as defeatism.
The question has never been, shall we leave today? The question is, shall we leave at all? McCain says we can’t leave until we “win”; we are no closer to “winning” than we were in 2005 (the year Americans mostly turned against the war); therefore we can never leave. You really think that’s a winning issue?
If McCain were to propose a timetable that is more flexible than Obama’s, or provides more time to create “stability and security,” that might work. But he doesn’t. He insists that there shall be no timetable at all.
So the fact remains that the election will be between McCain, who wants to keep the Iraq civil war going indefinitely even though the surge has demonstrably failed (unless you think 2005 levels of civil war violence equal “success”), and a candidate who agrees with the American people that we need a timetable for withdrawal and that we should be fighting Al-Qaeda instead of AQI. I’m OK with that comparison.
And Larry, by 1972 most of the troops were out of Vietnam, so it’s not the same thing. In 1968, the candidate who promised to get the troops out, Nixon, beat the candidate of the McCainiac “let the troops die forever” stripe, Humphrey.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:29 PM
The majority of the soldiers want to continue to win the war and secure the people.
The re-enlistment rate in Iraq is higher than out of Iraq.
If we leave without accomplishing the mission, the region will fall into greater chaos and the radical Islamic terrorists will have a better base from which to attack us.
If we pull out before the region is stabilized, we will need to go back and that will cost more in US and Iraqi lives and resources. It will also embolden Al Qaida, which is on the ropes.
Many say end the war. The problem with that statement is that it assumes that if we stop fighting, our enemy will also stop fighting. It is clear from their talk and their actions that our enemy will not stop fighting us just because we leave Iraq.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:42 PM
TB, at the end of 1971, there were over 156,000 troops in Vietnam. The war was very active. In early 1972, the lottery was held for men who were born in 1953. I remember listening to the lottery results on the radio with my college classmates. My birthdate was number 250. Tell me about how Iraq is worse.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:52 PM
TB, here’s another datum. According to the government archives, there were 2,357 American deaths in Vietnam in 1971. So going into the 1972 campaign, we had experienced a higher death rate than anything we’ve seen for a single year in Iraq.
March 13th, 2008 at 2:03 PM
Larry, according to this timeline, “the last U.S. combat troops” left Vietnam on August 23, 1972. There were still many troops there but they were a fraction of what they’d been when Nixon took office.
Nixon therefore could say, as he did in fact say, that he’d demonstrated a commitment to drawing down troops in an orderly manner. Bush is currently trying to put a hold on any troop withdrawals at all, and considers any troop withdrawals to be “defeatism.” And McCain agrees with this. That’s not comparable to 1972 when neither candidate was advocating “stay the course”; it’s more like 1968 when the “stay the course” candidate, Humphrey, lost.
Tell me about how Iraq is worse.
Your standard for whether something is bad is “is it worse than Vietnam?” Vietnam, which killed many more Americans, is probably worse than Iraq (although not as counter-productive to American interests as staying in Iraq, since Vietnam at least made some sense in the fight against Communism whereas invading Iraq actually helped the Islamists by removing their enemy, Saddam). But how does that make it OK to stay in Iraq forever?