Ross Douthat takes a long look at the effect of the surge on the political debate over Iraq and concludes that while perception of the surge's success makes it difficult for Democrats to appease their anti-war base, the surge also makes it tricky for Republicans, particularly John McCain, to campaign on success in Iraq for 2008. The poll numbers simply aren't there, Douthat argues, and the real effect of the surge has been to freeze withdrawal sentiment, not reverse it:
by reducing the body count and arresting Iraq's spiral down to civil war, it pushed the conflict off the front pages and often out of the public eye entirely. This achievement didn't increase support for the war, but it did reduce, at least on the margins, the priority that Americans placed on ending it, and allowed closer-to-home anxieties – over health care, the mortgage meltdown, immigration and now the looming recession – to rise to the fore.
This seems right to me, and certainly does put the Republicans in a tight spot: in order for them to run and win on the war, the surge must continue to be viewed as a success from now until November as well as increase support in the public for staying in Iraq as long as it takes. John "100 years" McCain has left himself little wiggle room when it comes to war policy, and his candidacy lives or dies (but by no means succeeds) based on the surge's ability to keep violence out of the newspapers. The Democrats, too, find themselves in an awkward position, but one that potentially offers more room to shift. Even if the surge continues to keep Iraq out of the news, that by no means prevents Democrats from calling for an end to the war. All they have to do is change the subject from the surge's visible product (less violence) to its intended goal (political reconciliation).
The smart thing for Democrats to do, if they're serious about ending our involvement in Iraq, is to avoid falling into the trap of talking about the surge purely in military terms. It seems all but forgotten now, but the original justification for the surge was to create enough security for political space, and ultimately, reconciliation to emerge in Iraq. Since declining levels of violence became the only metric cited as a way of gauging the surge's success (let's call it the "Petraeus effect"), how those declining levels of violence were achieved, and whether they had more to do with negotiating with local warlords than simply beefing up the United States' military presence, were forgotten, and so too was the original goal of the surge -- political reconciliation. It's politically easy to say "the surge has reduced violence." It's far more potent to ask, "is the reduced violence in Iraq leading towards a self-sustaining central government, or one that continues to be reliant on U.S. military might?" Whether Democrats possess the political will to make this argument come November remains to be seen.
--Mori Dinauer
