This week the box score seemed pretty clear: George W. Bush and the Senate GOP won, while Democrats and their anti-war legions lost. On a procedural vote in the Senate, Republicans made clear that they were holding firm and sticking with their president, and stymied legislation that would have mandated the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq later this year and early next year.
Under those circumstances the White House should be ecstatic, and, indeed, recent reports have the president in a jarringly good mood. But he ought to be careful of his friends, because one thing that emerged from the debate is that Republicans do not intend to defend this war past September. They have their own cut-and-run-from-the-White-House timetable. They begged that the surge be given a chance to work, and they bought the president the time that he said he needed for that to happen.
They have made the mid-September status reports by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker their pivot point. And nothing was clearer than the fact that they intend to jump off that bridge when they get to it.
"Gen. David Petraeus ... has said to give that surge an opportunity to do its job and he will come back and report to us in September. I think we ought to give that a reasonable chance," said Texas Republican John Cornyn. A reasonable chance may be asking a lot in eight weeks.
But Majority Leader Harry Reid's slumber party on Tuesday turned into a "Give Petraeus a Chance" rally for the Republicans. Still, after four years of fighting, it's hard to see how eight blazing hot weeks will significantly change the facts on the ground in Baghdad.
Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the strongest supporters of continuing the war, did not sound like he was expecting especially good news. "I don't think there is a person in this Chamber, no matter what our position on Iraq, that doesn't trust General Petraeus to tell us the truth, what he believes, when he comes back in September," Lieberman said.
Will the truth matter however? The thinking among some Democrats is that the president will declare progress in Iraq and announce some minor changes in strategy, maybe even some mention of the possibility of reduction in troop levels sometime next year. This may give a little cover to some of the more anxious GOP lawmakers, but not much.
What almost no one expects is for the president to admit that the war was a mistake; that the continued fighting is not accruing to our benefit, and that, therefore, it should end.
In fact, the president seems pretty clear that victory is with reach and worth all that it has cost and will in the future. "The real debate over Iraq is between those who think the fight is lost or not worth the cost," he said recently, "and those that believe the fight can be won and that, as difficult as the fight is, the cost of defeat would be far higher."
Indeed the themes of the GOP summer and fall arguments are now obvious: Forget the original reason for the war. Withdrawal from Iraq will create a chaotic failed state that will threaten our security and our interest in the future. The president will return to his "consequences of failure" themes of last spring and Hill Republicans will continue to remind us about the darkness beyond a troop pull-out.
"You know, I always enjoy hearing what we're going to do if General Petraeus's strategy doesn't succeed," said Sen. John McCain this week. "What are we going to do if the withdrawal results in chaos and genocide? We don't hear that question. I'd like to hear that asked a little more often."
Believe me he will, and often he will be among those asking it over and over again.
"...If we withdraw from Iraq, if we choose to lose there, there is no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, that we will be back -- in Iraq and elsewhere -- in many more desperate fights to protect our security and at an even greater cost in American lives and treasure."
It would be foolish to deny that Iraq could be a horror show following an American withdrawal. Iraq is a horror show now. The question is, can we fix that? And it is worth the lives, money, and everything else it is costing us? That may indeed be the dividing line in the Iraq debate, but the warnings of a post-withdrawal apocalypse carry the same speculative, trust-me tone of the pre-war warning of weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong then; they may be wrong again.
The trouble for the president is that he has almost no chance of convincing most of the American people this time around. And come September, he'll have his hands full with a few more Republican senators who will claim to have given him a reasonable chance.