Predictions are a tough business, as William Safire conceded in his December 29 return to The New York Times's op-ed page, opening his annual predictions column with the observation that his "predictions took a beating in 2006." As Daniel Radosh points out, that's actually a bit of an understatement: "Out of the 14 predictions Safire made last year at this time, 3 came to pass." That's a lot of bad predictions. The first was especially awful:
U.S. troops in Iraq at 2006 year's end will number: (a) current ''base line'' 138,000; (b) closer to 100,000; (c) closer to 90,000; (d) 80,000 or below.Safire answered (d), which was, of course, wrong. More to the point, readers playing at home were destined to miss the mark as well -- the truth, that there would be more troops in Iraq twelve months later -- wasn't even an option. Iraq, of course, has been a wellspring of terrible predictions from hawks like Safire ever since they began turning attention to the issue in 2002, with talk of cakewalks and nuclear weapons programs thick in the air. The interesting thing about Safire's miscue is how many of the Bush administration's political opponents have gotten this wrong as well.
Ever since the dog days of the 2004 election campaign, one has usually been able to find one liberal critic or another prepared to charge the Bush administration with a cynical plan to "declare victory and go home," relieving his party of the political problems of Iraq without solving any of the substantive issues there. This, we were told, would happen before Bush's electoral showdown with John Kerry. Or maybe it would happen before or during the 2006 campaign. Neither, of course, came to pass. Then the thinking held that the Iraq Study Group's "real" mission would be to provide "political cover" for a withdrawal the administration was presumed eager to effectuate.
But a funny thing happened between Election Day and the New Year. Jim Baker and co. didn't wind up endorsing withdrawal. And Bush didn't wind up endorsing Baker's baby steps in the direction of reconfiguring American policy in the region. The suggestion that it was time for a New Diplomatic Offensive was rejected out of hand. Syria and Iran will continue to be subject to American efforts to isolate them. Russian and Chinese hesitance to embrace isolating Teheran will be met by a campaign of hectoring rather than persuasion and deal-making.
As for Iraq itself, the president won't quite tell anyone what his new policy is going to be yet, but all indications are that he intends to escalate the conflict by embracing a plan devised by Fred Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute for a so-called "surge" of American troops into Iraq. The term is a pretty serious misnomer. As Kagan explained in a December 27 op-ed, he's talking about "a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so." A two-month increase is a surge. An 18-month increase -- in the context of a war financed by supplemental appropriations that don't even cover whole years -- might as well mean forever.
Bush remains, in short, committed to some kind of notion of victory in Iraq, though neither he nor anyone else can offer a plausible explanation of what that might mean or how it could be achieved. Indeed, in a fundamental way Bush seems to regard "winning" as simply equivalent to "not losing" and "losing" to be the same as "leaving." No matter how bad things get, that will never, to him, be a reason to give up and go home. Nor will apparent successes be a pretext for declaring victory and going home. The war will just continue -- if not forever, then at least until he's out of office.
Interestingly, the persistent inability of Bush's political opponents to understand his approach in this way reflects very much the same kind of wishful thinking that has hawks perennially believing that victory is right around the corner. Democrats want the war to end, but they don't want to be the ones who end it. They fear, not unreasonably, a reprise of the revisionist take on the Vietnam war, which blames the American debacle there not on the hawkish architects of the policy but on the doves who eventually forced the country to abandon its futile efforts in Southeast Asia. Under the circumstances, the convenient thing would be for Bush to wrap the war up and let the Democrats reap the political dividends.
It's not, however, going to happen. Politically, the party's best hope is that a Republican wannabe presidential nominee will decide to see if there's political space for an anti-war Republican, that candidate wins the GOP nomination, the 2008 election goes forward between two candidates who agree that the war should end, and American troops are withdrawn sometime in 2009. It could happen, but it's a long-shot, and so far we've seen no indication that things are heading in that direction. Sooner or later -- either this year or next in Congress, or else during the 2008 presidential campaign -- Democrats are going to need to face the reality that this war won't end unless they step up and do something to end it.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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