Everyone knows what September means regarding Iraq. This is the previously-scheduled Moment of Truth. And while almost no one expects that the news will be good, no one expects that the storyline from the White House will change significantly.
But September was to be the exit ramp that congressional Republicans had been constructing for themselves; it was going to be their bridge back to reality. All the warmth and renewal associated with end-of-summer reunions were widely expected to be replaced this September by a widespread abandonment of the president's position among the Hill GOP.
Take, for example, the indisputably conservative Senate minority leader and consummate team player, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. He foreshadowed the coming clash when he said that he expects a new course will emerge in the fall after General Patraeus and Ambassador Crockett issue their assessments of the military and diplomatic conditions in Iraq in September. "I think everybody anticipates that there's going to be a new strategy in the fall," McConnell said in a television appearance earlier this week.
Well, fall has come early to Washington.
When Dick Lugar and George Voinovich, senior GOP senators from Indiana and Ohio respectively, begin advising the president to begin withdrawal of troops, September is now. The slow creep toward the 60 votes needed to get anything done in the Senate continues, and Lugar's declaration that the president is almost out of time on Iraq will give cover to a lot of other GOP senators looking for reasoned way to break with the president. The GOP class up for re-election in 2008 is full of people looking to flee the president's side on the war: Coleman of Minnesota, Sununu of New Hampshire, Collins of Maine, and Smith of Oregon, who has already bailed on the White House.
Republicans like Lugar are not yet expressing solidarity with Democrats or pledging to vote with them to cut off funding or establish withdrawal time tables, but the table is being set for exactly that kind of action later on.
The expectation is that sometime soon, Virginia's John Warner, ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, will announce some kind of plan for Iraq that will be widely read as a break with the president. The likely results is a GOP caucus in the Senate that gets behind a Warner plan at the expense of the White House. Warner demanded a mid-July review of the situation in Iraq, and has said that he hopes the president would consider a change in direction then.
Warner and Lugar are not exactly mavericks. Lugar chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and is now its top GOP member. A clear conservative, he presents a reasonable package. The danger for the president here is that people like Warner and Lugar will start talking sense: Why not wait until September, when Patraeus delivers his assessment? Waiting, Lugar says, is harmful, because people will die in the interim.
"It's damaging because there will be more American casualties before September," he said on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "There will not be much progress by the Iraqi parliament and government … What is also being lost is the potential for a diplomatic initiative."
And even the most conservative presidential candidates are no longer hewing that close to the White House line that "We have to fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here."
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee told FOX News this week that the solution in Iraq must be a diplomatic one: "You have to involve all those other people in that neighborhood to begin with," he said. "We've been doing this way too much by ourselves. We need more help from the Saudis, the Turks, the Jordanians, the Syrians -- everybody in that neighborhood." And this is from a guy who thinks this is, in essence, a holy war. ("We're fighting people who have a theological basis for attacking us, not a geopolitical.")
For Democrats intent on ending the war, July and August may provide some measure of progress in that direction, but debates this summer will also draw closer the moment when the war and its fallout will become a political problem for anyone with power in Washington, not just President Bush. The Democratic Congress will also be held responsible for what comes next in Iraq.
And so they might want to think about beginning to shape that process to their advantage. The blueprint from the Iraq Study Group is the consensus action document on this front. It calls for an intense diplomatic initiative to help bind up the wounds -- social, geopolitical, and physical -- caused by the Iraq war around the globe.
But the international triage on Iraq will likely require more than simply the Baker-Hamilton action plan. The news that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be an envoy to the Middle East may be the most encouraging development in the region in a long time. Not simply because he is so deeply invested in the idea of peace in the region, but because it also means that a process that had languished in the unsteady hands of George W. Bush, Ehud Olmert, and Mahmoud Abbas, with altogether inconvenient help from Hamas and its benefactors, will have the attentions of a leader with perseverance and gilded political talents. And that's what it'll take.
Iraq will require at least that much, and sooner than September.
