HAS THE WAR ON IRAQ gone political? Already? One day before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began its hearings to discuss the coming war in Iraq, the committee's chairman, Senator Joe Biden, shared with reporters some of what was said in his consultations with top officials in the Bush administration. Biden said he would be "surprised if there was any [military intervention] in the near term, meaning between now and the first of the year." No big news there--that's the emerging conventional wisdom in Washington these days--but his next comment was striking. "I even went so far as to ask if there were any October surprises," Biden said, "and I was told, 'No, no October surprises.'"
Predictably, the media hyped that bottom line: no October surprise. The headline was splashed across newspapers around the country and dominated television news. The noteworthy part of the exchange, however, was not the answer, but the question. After all, could Biden have reasonably expected to hear, "Yep, we've got it teed up for October 27, right before the midterm elections"?
Words matter. And the presumption behind Biden's question is clear: President Bush would consider committing troops to boost Republicans politically. Although Democrats on Capitol Hill had been whispering their concern that Bush might try to distract voters from his economic troubles by attacking Iraq, no one had dared raise this possibility aloud. Until Biden.
But by asking the question and revealing the (meaningless) answer to the world, Biden has created a political environment in which it will
be more difficult for the administration to launch an attack before November--even if military considerations called for one. If the White House, citing national security, launched an attack in late September, Washington would explode with speculation about a "wag-the-dog" scenario. And while some of that would have happened even without Biden's "No October surprise" declaration, such second-guessing about political motivations would be greatly intensified.
Administration sources have generally been pleased with the way Biden has handled his role as the Senate's key foreign policy Democrat. And while the White House sent no representatives to last week's congressional hearings, it supported that public airing of the "Iraq issue" and has indicated that top national security officials will likely attend the next round. But some say that simply by raising the "October surprise" scenario, Biden has injected politics into the coming debate over the war.
"It's a sad day when President Bush is held to a standard of irresponsibility that Bill Clinton set," says an administration official, suggesting that Clinton used airstrikes in Sudan to distract the country from his Monica Lewinsky ordeal in 1998. "Just because Clinton did it doesn't mean Bush would."
Administration sources insist that the president has not decided on the timing of an attack on Iraq, and that military intervention before November remains on the table. "It's a logical and responsible assumption that if circumstances warrant, he would do what is needed to be done in order to protect us," says a Pentagon official with knowledge of planning on Iraq. "There's nothing I've seen to suggest it'll be before November, but we certainly can't rule that out, either."
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