This time there were no peace marches. There was no MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times calling the commander of coalition forces in Iraq "General Betray Us." There was no suggestion from Senator Hillary Clinton that crediting the commander's report on military progress in Iraq required the "willing suspension of disbelief." There were no votes on cutting off funds for the war. No expectation of passing a timetable for withdrawal.
All of which happened last time, when General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker first reported to Congress in September 2007 on the Bush administration's "surge" policy. But not this time. When Petraeus and Crocker returned to Washington last week, Congress was stymied. Subdued. Cowed. And the congressmen's "frustration," reported the Washington Post, "appeared to stem from a realization that there was little they could do to affect policy in the administration's final nine months."
The Post was right. Listening to congressmen meander through various lines of questioning over the two days of hearings, one detected a certain resignation to the idea that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq in substantial numbers at least through January 2009 and possibly well into the future.
Why the shift from an emboldened antiwar movement in 2007 to a despondent one in 2008? Democrats in Congress would say the reason is structural. They don't have the votes to overcome GOP filibusters or override presidential vetoes of antiwar legislation. But they do not say why this is the case. The reason they do not have the
votes is the success of the surge. If the surge had not forced Al Qaeda in Iraq into retreat, stanched the ethnosectarian conflict in Baghdad and surrounding provinces, and created the tenuous sense of security that has accompanied and encouraged ground-up reconciliation and national political progress, GOP support for the war would have collapsed. The Democrats would have had the votes to force a withdrawal. And Bush would have been unable to stop the rush to the exits.
That didn't happen. The surge's success so far has defanged the antiwar movement--for the moment.
Petraeus and Crocker have until January 20, 2009, to build on the recent gains. Their plan, endorsed by President Bush, is to withdraw the surge troops by July, then to consolidate and take stock, with any further drawdown of the remaining force of about 140,000 dependent on conditions on the ground. If John McCain is elected president, Petraeus and Crocker will probably have the backing of the new administration. But no matter who is elected in November, a large-scale American military and economic commitment to Iraq may outlast the Bush presidency. As former Bush adviser Peter Feaver noted in Commentary, Iraq may not look the same to a Democratic president in the Oval Office as it did to a candidate on "the stage of a college gymnasium filled with delirious Democratic primary voters."
In this scenario, a President Obama or a President Clinton assumes office, listens to the Joint Chiefs and the director of national intelligence, and--presto!--realizes that despite what was said on the trail, there is no easy way out of Iraq. For strategic and security reasons the American presence must continue for some time. Then the new president recalibrates plans for withdrawal, perhaps abandoning them altogether, and in a televised address from the Oval Office, coolly explains to the country that the difficult realities of a dangerous world require the commander in chief to renege on campaign promises of an orderly and timely "redeployment" from Iraq.
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