Ordinary American public opinion on the Iraq war is nearing a tipping point. The question is how elites -- the White House, the military, Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- will now respond.
The public has grasped that the Bush Iraq policy has made the Middle East more dangerous, for U.S. armed forces and for the U.S. national interest. This reality is widely sinking in, except to a narrowing circle of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a compliant George W. Bush.
Not a day goes by without some surprise attack in Iraq showing the insurgency gaining, not on the run. Civil society for ordinary Iraqis is getting more dangerous, not more orderly.
The enterprise of “nation-building,” an idea once ridiculed by candidate Bush, has become the disaster he warned about. It took the founders of America more than a decade to get from the failed Articles of Confederation to the Philadelphia convention and the 1789 Constitution. The Iraqis, far more divided and under siege, face absurd U.S. orders to complete their process in a few weeks.
Voters have no appetite for an indefinite occupation. The most recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows Americans consider the war to be a mistake by a 54-percent to 44-percent margin, and 56 percent want some or all U.S. troops withdrawn.
Cindy Sheehan's encampment outside Bush's ranch, and Bush's inept response, has begun to catalyze the administration's worst nightmare -- a revived anti-war movement led by the loved ones of GIs killed or wounded in Iraq, and by Iraq veterans themselves.
But now what? Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin has bravely proposed complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2006. But most leading foreign-policy experts in both parties, such as Democrat Joe Biden and Republican John McCain, who have been scathingly critical of the war, can't quite bring themselves to discuss withdrawal, which connotes weakness or defeat.
This is muddled thinking. There are in fact exit strategies more likely to produce tolerable stability than the present course.
One approach, promoted by the former minister of electricity in Iraq's interim government, Aiham al-Sammarae, would pursue a political solution to what is plainly becoming a civil war. Sammarae, long a prominent opponent of Saddam Hussein, has conferred with a range of U.S. officials. He proposes bringing in most excluded groups that now fuel the armed insurgency.
Sammarae ties this process to a phased U.S. withdrawal, a reduction of Iranian influence, and a political settlement, with major armed resistance groups participating except the minority of foreign Jihadists and terrorists of the al-Zarkawi network, who would then be politically isolated. Sammarae's idea has been largely invisible in the U.S. press (one notable exception being investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss).
As part of a stabilization process, U.S. troops could be replaced by a multinational constabulary and reconstruction force. The American occupiers, now a resented lightning rod, would exit Iraq, sparing thousands of young Americans likely to be killed or maimed in coming months, and reducing the level of daily violence menacing Iraqis.
In the meantime, there is growing independence among GOP members of Congress, who got a cold wake-up call last month when Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran highly critical of President Bush, nearly won an upset special election in Ohio's most Republican congressional district. Republican Jean Schmidt barely won, 52-48, down from a 72-percent win in 2004 by incumbent Rob Portman, who recently stepped down to become U.S. Trade Representative.
As Bush becomes a lamer duck by the day, Republicans now worry more about saving their own seats in 2006. Unlike Bush, they must listen to public opinion.
As support for withdrawal grows in the country, so it grows in Congress. In May, five House Republicans, along with 123 Democrats, supported Representative Lynn Woolsey's amendment to the defense authorization bill calling on Bush submit a withdrawal plan -- up from last January, when only 35 members of Congress, all Democrats, supported Woolsey's similar resolution. Woolsey plans hearings on withdrawal strategies next month.
But in the Senate, ironically, the most prominent Democratic foreign policy spokesmen are fearful of seeming irresolute, and reluctant to embrace anything smacking of withdrawal. A June op-ed column in The New York Times by John Kerry criticized Bush, but proposed mainly better planning and training of Iraqis, and creation of a multi-national force to secure Iraq's borders -- all smart variants on Bush's policy, but none likely to hasten America's withdrawal.
Public opinion is fast outflanking Bush's war. It remains to be seen which party will lead in cleaning up his mess.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared in the Boston Globe.
