Juan Cole has a sobering take at his site today about the Petraeus hearings. The upshot is that while Petraeus’s shot at success of any sort in Iraq (let’s call it a general cooling of ethnic tensions and mass violence) is a very long shot, Dems should want to let him continue trying. And that for the following reasons …
Given the stabilization of Republican support for the war, there’s not a lot Democrats can do to force the president to end the war during his term. Even if you assume heroic budgetary battles, there’s just not enough time left. Even the most aggressive timetables for withdrawal would take upwards of a year to execute. And Bush is down to 18 months.
Add to that the fact that Cole believes that all hell really will break loose once US troops leave — a not improbable assumption. And you come up with the conclusion that a Democratic president comes into office in early 2009 just in time to oversee Iraq’s descent into anarchy.
Not that it’s not pretty anarchic already. It’s just that a lot of chaos we’ve sown will only be fully realized when we leave — somewhat like you don’t fully realize or lock in investment losses until you have to sell the stocks or other assets at fractions of what you bought them for. Until then you can always pretend the value is going to rebound.
I’m not sure I fully agree with Juan about the implicit assumptions about how the domestic US politics play out. But he’s certainly right that the Republicans, conservatives and especially various characterologically malformed neoconservatives will blame on the party in power in 2009 (most likely the Democrats) the outcomes that Bush’s fiasco have already made inevitable.
Thus the central Bush policy aim of making this mess someone else’s problem. The Dems play the role of the one of Pop’s business associates who come in and buy W’s failed company out just in time for it to crash and burn.
Via Laura Rozen, I see we have another journalism fraud exposed. This time it’s a pseudo-expert in national security matters named Alexis Debat:
Debat is a well-known “expert” in Washington with an impressive resume: He serves as a fellow at the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank; he collaborates with The National Interest; a quarterly journal of international affairs; he has been consultant to ABC News for years. He belongs to the “expert market” of Washington DC. He appears credible, and the media often quotes him on matters pertaining to terrorism and Islam. . . .
Alexis Debat is a strange character, with a resume that changes depending on who he is talking to. Once he claimed to our colleague Guillemette Faure, a reporter for Le Figaro, that he got his PhD in political science from Edenvale University, in Great Britain, a university which proved to be a a fraud.
Another time, he said that he received his PhD from the University of Sorbonne. But that’s not true either. “He manufactured his doctorate. I had the document which he manufactured in my hands,” says André Kaspi, a professor of North American history at the Sorbonne. Debat does not deny a “conflict” with the Sorbonne, but refuses to elaborate.
What apparently got Debat in trouble was publishing in a French magazine what purported to be an interview with Barack Obama, except Obama’s people say no such interview actually occurred. Hard to figure how Debat thought that would slip by. But Debat’s strange story doesn’t end there. And as Laura notes, there’s more to this story that has yet to be satisfactorily explained.
Late Update: Mr. Debat provided TPM with a written response to this post which can be viewed in full here.
Quite a few commentators have noted that the decrease of violence in Anbar province cannot be because of the surge since it clearly predated the surge. That’s just basic logical reasoning. And the numbers seem to bear it out. But this blogger suggests a more precise theory: that it was the US midterm election that turned the tide.
Specifically, did the change in thinking among the Sunni tribal chiefs happen because (in response to the 2006 elections) they could see that the US military presence would be winding down?
Look at the graph on page seven of Petraeus’s slides. November is where the shift happens. (One might also hypothesize a degree of intentional ramp-up of violence to affect the November election.)
I think this may be too neat and economical an explanation and may play on our own ability to project our worldview and circumstances on to an Iraqi one we don’t understand very well. But I suspect that some version of this may actually play some role. Especially when you consider that the switch likely has more to do with preparing for a future confrontation with the Shia government than a rethinking of the tactical alliance with ‘al Qaeda.’
Pulitzer-winner Charlie Savage explains why the Bush Administration’s grasp for more executive power has been one of its most successfully implemented policy initiatives.
TPM Reader TB responds …
I don’t readily agree with Mr. Cole’s political assessment either (and to be fair your analogy of the Dems playing the role of holding the bucket when everything crashes and burns). There is a very relevant historical comparison that could be made here, and that’s Vietnam.
Ask yourself more than 30 years on, who gets the blame for the Vietnam catastrophe? Richard Nixon, or Lyndon Johnson? Did Nixon or Ford get the blame for losing Vietnam after the pullout? Did Gerald Ford lose in 1976 because the Democrats blamed him for losing the war?
This is Mr. Bush’s mess – he and his Party cannot escape it, or history.
I think I agree with this heavy note of skepticism about who gets blamed for other this, at least to the degree that people think that the Democrats will ‘own’ the war post-2008. Many people would see Vietnam as the analogy, not the counter-example to Juan Cole’s point. But I would say this. People aren’t stupid. Second, not everything is Vietnam. As a very wise guy once said: History never repeats itself. It only appears to to those who don’t know the details.
Of the many ways that Vietnam was unique is that the Democrats were in many ways both the party that got the country into the war and was also the party that became imbued (or tainted, depending on your viewpoint) with the culture of anti-war protest. But the lates 1960s and early 1970s were a very unique period in our national history. People, I believe, tend to loose track of the profound cultural (counter-cultural) dimension of the anti-war movement. And there is simply nothing comparable today — to many people’s disgust and disappointment. Opposition to the Iraq War is a profoundly mainstream position. And seldom, very seldom, has a war been so bought, conceived of, planned voted for and everything else by one administration and one political party.
I understand that there’s a lot of very bitter disappointment in the Democrats over ending the war. I agree with some of it. But I doubt much of anything that happens from this point will efface, wash away or even substantially diminish the central fact that this is on George W. Bush’s moral and political dime, and sustained from day one till today by the Republican party.
A lot of Republicans know that very well.
You don’t want to put too much emphasis on one response over two days of hearings, but when Sen. John Warner (R-VA) asked Gen. Petraeus a short time ago if victory in Iraq would make America safer, Petraeus hedged before saying, “I don’t know.” Perhaps it was just a moment of uncharacteristic befuddlement for the general, but if the answer to that question isn’t a resounding yes, then, even on the Bush Administration’s own terms, it’s time to start loading up the troop carriers in Kuwait and bring our people home.
Late Update: In follow-up questioning from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Petraeus backtracked from his “I don’t know” to Sen. Warner.
For all that’s happened, I still have a respect for Gen. Petraeus. Even though he’s made himself into a GOP operative in the domestic political fight over Iraq, I think I agree with Juan Cole that over in Iraq I believe he’s doing his best as a professional soldier to salvage something from a catastrophic mess. But here just before 4:00 PM I’m listening to Sen. Lieberman’s colloquy with the general. And I really don’t think I can think of anyone in this debate who is more treacly, sanctimonious and self-serving than Joe.
He’s become that bad.
Late Update: Joe still wants to invade Iran and asked Petraeus about it. Take a look.–DK
As part of the surge-week PR offensive, the President will make a primetime address Thursday announcing that he intends to bring the surge to an end next summer. That means 30,000 U.S. troops will be rotated home without replacements. The White House–and most press reports–will describe this as a troop withdrawal, which is true in a very narrow sense. But this can’t seem to be repeated often enough, if credulous press reports are any indication: the surge was only ever designed to be temporary and could not be sustained for any longer than next summer without seriously compromising overall U.S. military readiness. So the surge is coming to end, and troop levels will return to late 2006 levels. The White House can tout it as a troop withdrawal. Gen. Petraeus can claim it is his best professional military judgment. But bringing the surge to an end is a hard reality born of an overstretched military. They can smear all the lipstick they want on that pig, but it’s still a pig.