The war on terror is now the war on failure. If you listen to President Bush, it seems clear that avoiding failure has become his bottom-line consideration for continuing to prosecute the war in Iraq. No more weapons of mass destruction; no more avenging 9/11, or fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here; no more establishing a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. Now we just can't fail.
"Whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure,” the president cautioned the Congress in his State of the Union. But the American people now think that they did just that in 2004: Polls show that a majority think the country is headed in the wrong direction, and almost two-thirds disapprove of the way the president is handling his job. And, of course, there were those November election results.
Still, the president keeps adding to the ever-evolving complex of rationales for continuing the war. As he put it on Monday to NPR's Juan Williams, "I understand it's controversial and I understand people are skeptical and I understand there's pessimism here. I also want your listeners to know that a lot of people here in Washington also understand that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the Iraqi people and for the American people."
He was not asked for, and did not offer, any precise picture of what failure in Iraq would look like, but I think the American people have been getting to see bootleg copies on the news everyday, and they don't like it. If the current set of circumstances on the ground does not add up to failure, I don't know what does. Clearly, however, the president contemplates scenarios in which things get worse. I can't argue with that. What's troubling is that even he doesn't sound confident that his last ditch effort can or will work. I can't argue with that either!
“I'm hopeful that the decision I have made is going to yield enough results so that the Iraqi government is able to take more of the -- more of the responsibility,” he told Williams. NPR recorded a question from a soldier in Iraq, who put the central question to Bush as straightforwardly as possible: What if the surge does not work? His response: “… I put it in place on the advice of a lot of smart people, particularly the military people who thinks it will work, and let us go into the -- into this aspect of the -- of the Iraqi strategy feeling it will work.”
“Hopeful” and “feel[ing] it will work" is how you go into the 9th race at Belmont when you have a 10-to-1 long-shot and you've been winning all day. We have not been winning, and the stakes are considerably higher -- to be hopeful is folly.
It may be that the president can't allow himself to be anything less than hopeful. We appear to be staring down a cataclysm in Iraq without any options to forestall it. To admit that would be to admit that the war itself was a mistake, and while most people in the country now believe that, the president of the United States is not among them. And this, of course, is not the kind of mistake that is easy to face up to: It's not as if the president accidentally knocked off the side mirror on somebody's minivan. The war has produced more than 3,000 dead Americans, many more dead Iraqis, and an entire region on the brink. Even if he were to acknowledge the mistake, the natural reaction would be to work hard to fix it, to try to un-make the mistake -- which, in this case, looks to be an impossible task. He's trapped.
But here is where a clear-eyed, courageous Congress led by the opposition party could be helpful. Instead of worrying about political fallout or how the White House will work against them, Democrats ought to see this as an opportunity to rescue the president from his own private prison.
The Democratic position is that this is the president's war, and it's his problem. And that's true as far as it goes. But, in a way, the president isn't actually better situated to end the war than anyone else now. He is locked into his position and will not move from it – unless forced to by some external actor or event. Maybe a large terrorist attack at home serves to underline the pointlessness of the war; maybe the countries in the region, or the warring parties within Iraq, broker some kind of deal to prevent a full-scale conflagration; maybe the Iraqis ask us to leave; maybe the Congress says, no more money for this war.
Maybe Chris Dodd's presidential campaign picks up a little head of steam because he builds it around themes he laid out this week -- challenging his colleagues to get serious about forcing the president's hand. Next week, the Senate will begin voting on one of the non-binding resolutions with which it hopes to send a message to the president. Dodd dismisses that approach: "Why not force them to pay attention to what we say up here?" he told reporters Thursday. "This is the United States Senate, this is not a city council somewhere."
Dodd will spend the next few months apologizing to city council members all over the country, but he's completely unapologetic about where he has arrived on the war: "I cannot in good conscience continue to go along with a failed policy that will lead to loss of life," he said. "My position on the war is very straightforward. I'm strongly opposed to sending additional troops to a civil war that can't be won militarily."
Failure in Iraq, it seems, may well be a done deal. The major task for the Democrats and Congress in general is to find the best and quickest way to get the president to embrace his failure at the least cost to the country.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C. His weekly column for TAP Online appears Fridays.
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