Last week we tried to nail down members of the Republican leadership in Congress on where they stand on the President’s soon-to-be-proposed “surge.” The response? Mostly silence.
But in an interview published today, one veteran Republican congressman says he is “highly skeptical” that a surge will have any real effect on the ground. Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), who won re-election after a hard-fought campaign, was surprisingly candid in an interview with the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette:
In my opinion, itâs been a civil war. But the question of a civil war is: Is there a functioning central government that can win a civil war? ⦠Whatâs not clear to me is if this government can ever be stable and that the civil war has gone from skirmishing and marginal fighting at the terrorist level and some Shiite militias to the dominant pattern. Thereâs no number of troops we can put on the ground to basically battle inside of a large-scale civil war without a functioning central government.
If we see that itâs developed that way, do we stay to 2008 or do we get out in 2007? At what point do you say weâve gone across the line where thereâs not a hope of stability or at least that it appears to be small?
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I think itâs intriguing that the president is looking at trying to put more troops on the ground like Sen. McCain has suggested all the way along. But my impression â and I havenât been there since spring â is that weâve passed that point. Even doubling the number of troops on the ground wonât do it. Instead of just having potentially a few thousand people that youâre trying to stabilize who are picking at random where to hit, or even 20,000, basically at this point the whole countryâs engaged. Which means an increase in troop power isnât going to stabilize it.
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Itâs the beginning of the end. The question now is how fast.
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What is it going to look like if we all of a sudden immediately pulled out, pulled out in six months, 12 months or 18 months? Now weâre back to whatâs in the interest of the United States and our world security picture, not trying to establish a government in Iraq. ⦠I donât have any confidence they have a plan. So maybe our troops have to stay there till â08 till we get a plan of whatâs a withdrawal look like. So I donât know the answer to your question, but I know what variables Iâm looking for.
If they can make a compelling case that more troops on the ground would give us a chance, Iâm willing to listen. But Iâm highly skeptical.
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In my opinion the American people have already closed the book on âare we willing to wait until they have established a free and democratic government thatâs safe and secure in Iraq?â The answer is no â unless they can do it awful fast.
Souder may be something of an outlier. He was one of the few GOP members whom I recall coming out publicly for pulling troops back even before the election. But overall he is a reliable conservative from a reliably conservative state. If the President loses the Mark Souders, he’s in big trouble on the Hill.
On one level, it’s hard to imagine the GOP minority not coming around to support the President’s surge. At the same time, these same folks just endured a withering political climate first-hand; saw some of their longtime colleagues defeated; won re-election in some cases by much narrower margins and after spending much more money than in the past; and by and large got an unpleasant earful from voters back home. They face election campaigns in two short years. The President doesn’t.
Even if the GOP presents a united front in support of the surge, as I expect it will, you can bet that just below the surface will be much skepticism and caution. With Souder’s remarks, the cracks in that facade are already showing.