The Iraq War
In January, I wrote in this column that President Bush had run out of options in Iraq. Now it is clear that the Democratic leadership is slowly taking over Iraq policy even though Bush won the battle over the $94 billion Iraq Accountability Act that passed Congress just before Memorial Day.
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Bush is now in the same boat Jimmy Carter found himself in 1979. Carter’s presidential fortunes from 1979 onward were in the hands of the Iranian hostage takers in Tehran. Likewise, Bush’s political capital is now at the mercy of the perpetrators of violence in Baghdad. Repeated polls have shown that two-thirds of Americans have lost hope in the Iraq War and confidence in Bush. A slight majority wants out of Iraq now.
The Democratic Leadership has a plan to gradually squeeze Bush’s funding of the war until a troop withdrawal policy is in place. The Democratic strategy posits that as the 110th Congress moves closer to the 2008 elections, more and more Republicans will feel electoral pressure to join Democratic demands. As New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer put it recently: „Make them vote over and over on an unpopular war until their resolve crumbles.” The plan has to be gradual because there is a deeply held public sentiment that US troops should not be made the scapegoat in this political standoff. If the Democrats appear not to support US troops sufficiently, a public backlash against their strategy could undo all the political gain harvested from squeezing Bush.
When Bush requested additional funding to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in March, Democrats took the opportunity to attach binding troop limits to the spending bill to start withdrawing troops later in 2007. After more than 30 procedural votes and 108 days of delay, and just before Bush would veto the second draft bill, they released the bill and dropped the without troop withdrawal conditions knowing that by September Bush has to come back for more supplementary spending.
It is indeed a ”slow-bleed strategy”, as one Republican noted. Bush won the battle, but all signs point to him slowly losing the war. Negotiations in this prolonged game of chicken between the Congress and the White House may well drag out until the 2008 presidential elections. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner and Republic Whip Roy Blunt both noted in recent weeks that benchmarks for improvement should be put in future appropriations bills. Twenty-one of the thirty-five senators up for election in 2008 are Republican incumbents. They know that Iraq is the lead weight on their ankles. Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, indicated that „the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall, and I expect the president to lead it.” There is speculation that Bush will move closer to the Baker-Hamilton recommendations in the Iraq Study Group Report of late 2006, including the idea of limiting US forces to training Iraqis.
Democrats do not want the troops to get out of Iraq too quickly. They may well own the ugly endgame but do not want the brunt of it before they capture the White House and increase their majority in Congress in November 2008. Since Bush’s unpopularity is tied to the war in Iraq and since the level of violence there continues to make front-page news, they want to keep Bush’s handling of Iraq as the number one political issue.
The author is professor of international relations at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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