The new-age Septembrists turned out to be dead wrong after all. They were all convinced that by the time of the Harvest Moon the political and policy architecture of U.S. involvement in Iraq would have been altered, at least slightly.
That proved to be wishful thinking of the highest order. September has turned in July with nicer weather. The Webb amendment -- the Democrats best chance of attracting GOP support to force a change in U.S. action in Iraq -- got 56 votes in July; it got 56 votes in September.
Setting aside the 180 American troops killed between July 11, when the first vote on the Webb amendment failed, and Wednesday when it failed again, it's almost as if nothing happened in the intervening time.
Nothing except John Warner's change of heart and vote. Warner, the Virginia Republican, is the grand eminence of the Senate and something of an oracle on military matters. He voted 'yes' in July and 'no' this week. He said the generals changed his mind, and as a result he was willing stand by the administration a little bit longer.
"It is a change of vote for me, I recognize that," he said on the Senate floor before the vote on Wednesday, "but I change that vote only after a lot of very careful and analytical work with the uniformed side of the Department of Defense." With the previously ailing Tim Johnson back in the Senate the yeas remained at 56, despite Warner's switch.
It may have been Warner's "careful and analytical" retreat -- more than the Petraeus report or the President's new "return on success" doctrine or the White House veto threat -- that have so frozen things in place.
Warner was supposed to provide the exit ramp for other GOP senators seeking to abandon the president. In the coming months Senate Republicans, particularly those up for re-election may find themselves asking if John Warner took the high road only to lead them over a cliff in the end.
The Webb amendment, which became the Webb-Hagel amendment by the time it re-emerged this week, proposed that American troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan be allowed to stay home for as long as they have been gone, before they are made to return to the fight. Fight for a year, home for a year. Simple
Clearly, it is a political document crafted to avoid some of the ideological sniper fire from the White House and war supporters, but there is a human resonance to it that Republicans ignore at their own peril. In the "fifth year of Mr. Bush's war" as one Democrat senator billed it last week, people are gone too long and families are feeling it in their guts.
It is difficult for the average person to assess how well the surge is working or how to keep abreast of the changing conditions in al-Anbar Province. What is much easier to process is the unfairness of having family, friends, and co-workers gone for longer-than-usual stretches and home for shorter periods in between. People get that.
"We cannot continue to look at war and the people who fight and die in wars as abstractions, as pawns, as objects," Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel lamented. "This, somehow, is framed, always, in policy dynamics. The humanity of this is lost."
Likely not on the voters.
And Republican votes in favor of the amendment reflect that larger political concern. In addition to Hagel, who will not seek re-election in 2008, and Maine moderate Olympia Snowe, who is not up for re-election until 2012, the legislation's GOP supporters represent the most vulnerable incumbents on the ballot next year -- John Sununu of New Hampshire, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota.
The September theory held that they would have more GOP company by now, but when Warner backed away, others like Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) both of whom are up for re-election and have expressed a desire for a change of policy in Iraq, decided to stick with the president.
That loyalty may prove costly. The Democratic strategy is clear: tie GOP senators as closely as possible to the president and the war. "I call on the Senate Republicans to not walk lock-step as they have with the president for years in this war," Majority Leader Harry Reid said last week. "It's the president's war. At this stage, it appears clearly it's also the Republican senators' war."
And it by next September, it'll only be even more so.
