Plan B
A great column at the Washington Post by William Arkin:
With everyone now committed to finding “common ground” in Iraq, it appears that the Democratic Party commitment to force an end to the war was just theater.
Compromise now means benchmarks and Presidential certification after which the Congress can still dither. The President not only has bought time but demonstrated the supremacy of the Executive in matters of national security, a fact of life even before the Bush administration.
After President Bush vetoed the Iraq funding bill Monday, the two leading Democratic Party candidates for President were out front in seeking a political compromise, separating themselves from the Pelosi/Reid rhetoric and the more radical proposals of the other candidates.
The maneuvering by Sen. Hillary Clinton to hug the center should come as no surprise. The Senator is merely continuing her track of demonstrating her readiness to actually govern by being a hawk and a realist.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, retreated to compromise and conventional wisdom despite his previous call to remove all “combat brigades” from Iraq by the end of March 2008. He would have a better chance of earning the respect and the support of the American voters, nonetheless, if he eschewed the standard political playbook and looked to Ronald Reagan for a lesson in absolutism.
What he is talking about, you ask?
The alternative plans all have that alternate stamp of political unreality. The Biden’s and the Kucinich’s partake in the game by providing the extremes (though I’m sure they don’t see it that way) and conventional wisdom triumphs somewhere in the middle with “what is possible.” What is possible is not necessarily what is desirable, and sometimes there is a Vietnam-like collapse altogether, which is certainly still a possibility in Iraq.
When Ronald Reagan became President - new arms race, nuclear war looming, and earth really in the balance - there was a stark stand-off between those who thought they knew what was possible and some naïve and unattainable dream. The dominant hard nosed realist arms control community outside the government and the hardliners within the administration were united in agitating against the president’s constant utterances in favor of nuclear disarmament.
Amidst delicate negotiations to weigh nuclear warheads and measure them to the last millimeter where reams of paper were needed to document the provisions of this and that control and “limitation,” the President would say ‘let’s just get rid of them all.’ The sage would denounce the call as impossible or even dangerous, and then miraculously, the Soviets would time and again agree.
It is a great tactic: o, okay, you want to withdraw? Fine, we will do so immediately and we will leave no troops behind, the consequences be damned. Let them kill each other, let millions of people be killed within a couple of months time, who cares, we want to withdraw. Political games? Sure, but not much different from the political games the Democrats are playing. Most Democrats, like most Republicans, do not care much about “right” or “wrong”, they care about winning elections.
Of course, that is exactly why the founding fathers of America designed the system as they did: they recognized that people who have power want just one thing: more power and used this hunger for power against those actually in positions of power.
Michael no one would argue that the executive in question has mismanaged the war from the beginning. The intelligence was exaggerated to convince the country that they had WMD’s and were ready to attack. This later turned out to be untrue. The GOP basically wrote blank checks for 6 years, even though they knew that Bremer had failed and that Rumsfeld was failing abominably. Now the Democrats are trying to hold Bush to the terms that he himself set out for the surge. He himself said that the Iraqi government would have to meet certain benchmarks, that our involvement was not open-ended. Now he is refusing to hold them accountable, but wants a blank check from Congress.
You can blame Pelosi and Reid all you want, but they are only doing what 70% of Americans (democrats and independents) want them to do. That’s how democracy works- checks and balancesBush is not an imperial executive- they have shared war powers. .Vietnam ended because most of the public stopped supporting it, and that’s what’s happening here as well. This was probably the biggest foreign policy mistake in our history, and we and the Iraqs are paying for it dearly.
There is no way that a Democrat will leave the troops high and dry over there. But no matter when we pull out there will be bloodshed. Bush waited way too long to try to get other countries in the region to help with Iraq’s security. As you see, Condi is now approaching Syria and Iran, for their help. That’s the only solution. And I wonder how much Bush really cares about the Iraqis. In five years only 67 have been admitted into this country as war refugees. Millions have fled, many after helping our forces, and now are penniless. Where is his concern for them? He created their situation, and should be helping them.