The president's State of the Union plea to the Congress and the country to give war just one last chance in Iraq was actually a deft performance for a man faced with so few options for wriggling out of the corner he's boxed himself into.
Despite the tandem military and political disasters that have torpedoed his presidency, Bush on this occasion tried to lead by example, doing what he is asking of the rest of us -- and, particularly, the people fighting and dying in Iraq -- to do: He soldiered on, blindly, wishfully. "Every one of us wishes this war were over and won," he said in one blazing moment of truth. But wishful thinking aside, the urgent question before Congress is: What course of action -- emphasis on action -- will most quickly and effectively roll back the president's state of denial and force an end to the carnage in Iraq, at least where Americans are concerned?
Despite a deep frustration about the dismal circumstances of the war and some harsh rhetoric about the inanity of the surge plan -- the escalation, the "plussing up" -- the response so far has been one marked by the same kind of political caution that infected the Capitol in the run-up to the 2002 votes authorizing the war in the first place.
The controlling intelligence, based on the political calculus of the moment, holds that the strategic approach is to leverage the president's grim poll numbers and the unpopularity of the war into a non-binding resolution rejecting the surge, which in turn would further isolate the president, perhaps forcing him see the light and change the course of the war. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed such a measure, and next week we are likely see heated debate in the full Senate. (Republicans have threatened to filibuster it.)
But even given open skepticism about whether such a strategy could work on a president who is almost theological in his beliefs about the rightness of his chosen course, Democrats have bet almost all their chips on the congressional repudiation strategy.
Don't underestimate the power of such a vote, says Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the new chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "You are further isolating the president," says Levin. "The president is on one side and the American people are on the other." The calculation is that squeezing the president politically is a wiser course than ending the war by cutting off the money to pay for it. Most congressional Democrats just don't want to go there.
Levin and others warn that votes to cut off funding would be difficult to win and could help Bush. "Every time you have a vote and lose, the president uses it to pursue his strategy. He goes out and says, 'The Senate is with me, the American people are with me.' So that's the strategic political reason for not doing it that way."
On the de-funding issue, the opinions among most of the Democratic caucus range from "That's a long way off” to "That's political suicide." Generally, it's not even a threat they want on the table.
A notable exception is freshman Senator Bernie Sanders, who says that Congress has to call the administration to account: "At some point we are going to say, 'We are not going to give you money to fight and endless war.'"
But even in a Democratic caucus that owes its majority status to unhappiness over the war in Iraq, Sanders' position is a minority one; the deep belief is that voters will punish politicians who don't support the troops. And clearly, Democrats fear that the White House will win any argument over what it actually means to support the soldiers in Iraq.
"The president thinks he can bully people into doing things that are inconsistent with the welfare of the troops by saying 'You're not supporting the troops,''" laments California Democrat George Miller. "Well, Democrats are going to have to get over that."
Indeed. While I am not advocating any kind of moratorium on political calculation in Washington, there are two factors for Democrats to consider. First, this is exactly the kind of calculation that compelled 29 Democratic senators and 81 House Democrats to vote for the war in October 2003. Most of them and a lot of their Republican colleagues, would love to take that vote back now. Secondly, this is a serious and consequential moment: With more than 3,000 Americans and hundred of thousands of Iraqis dead -- and many more of both wounded -- the stakes are clear.
This is no longer a guessing game about mythical weapons in mobile trailers scuttling across the desert floor, or some fanciful notion of setting "freedom on the march in the broader Middle East." This is now about Army Captain Brian S. Freeman, age 31 of Temecula, Calif., who ended up in the 'Names of the Dead' box in The New York Times this week. Freeman was a world-class bobsledder who competed on the U.S. national team. He has a wife and two kids, ages three and one, and he was killed along with four others in an ambush in Karbala last Saturday. As Bush delivered his State of the Union address, the American death toll in Iraq stood at 3,064. "This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in," was how he put it.
For Congress, the only pertinent consideration should be how we get out. And in this, it would not be wrong the take to heart something the President said on Tuesday night: "The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour -- when decisions are hard and courage is needed."
Courage, indeed. Not calculation.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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