WE’RE NOT IN 2006 ANYMORE
By Michael Barone
RealClearPolitics, IL
/were_not_in_2006_anymore.html
Oct 22 2007
Things are not working out as Democratic congressional leaders
expected. For the first eight months of this year, they struggled to
find some way to shut down the American military effort in Iraq.
They took it for granted that we were stuck in a quagmire in Iraq,
with continuous high casualties and very little to show for them.
They pressed hard to get the Republican votes they needed to block
a filibuster in the Senate and were cheered when some Republicans,
like John Warner, seemed to lean their way. They worked hard over
the August recess to pressure Republican House members to break ranks
and vote with them.
But the Republicans mostly held fast. Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell skillfully parried their thrusts in the Senate. House
Minority Leader John Boehner persuaded most House Republicans to hang
on. Then, over the summer, the news out of Iraq started to get better.
Mainstream media types tend to think that, while rising casualties
from Iraq are legitimate news, falling casualties are not. But even
so the word got out: The surge strategy was producing results. Anbar
province, given up for lost in 2006, turned peaceful and cooperative
in 2007. U.S. casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties were down.
Brookings scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, no fans
of the administration’s conduct of the war, announced on July 30
(in the pages of The New York Times, no less) that this was "a war
we might just win."
The congressional Democrats got ready for one more push in September.
But the testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan
Crocker cut the ground from under their feet. Now, Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (who declared last spring that the war was lost) and
Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem to have thrown in the towel. The Democratic
Congress will not use its power to appropriate to end the surge or
to bring the soldiers home.
That leaves the left wing of the party angry at its leaders and the
party split on the war, much as it was in 2002, when about half of
congressional Democrats voted to authorize military action.
The Democrats here suffered from a lack of imagination. They could not
imagine that the United States military could perform more effectively
in 2007 than it did in 2005 and 2006.
George W. Bush seems to have had a similar lack of imagination until
the November 2006 elections woke him up. But he chose a new commander
and a new strategy, and things have changed. Democratic leaders have
acted on the assumption that the status quo of November 2006 would
persist indefinitely.
The Democrats have found themselves on the defensive on other issues,
as well. Last week, the House Democrats were forced to delay a vote on
their version of the revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, which among other things would have prohibited surveillance of
communications between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in
the United States without a court warrant.
The House Democrats were responsive to left-wingers’ theoretical
concerns about abusive surveillance and unconcerned that most voters
don’t want the National Security Agency to hang up when Osama bin Laden
calls the United States. In any case, they were undercut when Senate
Democrats agreed to a revision that did not contain that provision
and others unacceptable to the Bush administration.
The House Democratic leadership also backed down last week from its
determination to bring a resolution condemning the Turkish government’s
massacre of Armenians in 1915-16. The Turkish government took umbrage
at this, and its parliament voted to authorize military action in
Iraq’s Kurdish provinces against anti-Turkish Kurdish guerrillas —
a nightmare scenario in the one part of Iraq that has been consistently
peaceful and pro-American since 2003.
Senior House Democrats like John Murtha and Ike Skelton said the
resolution was a bad idea, and Nancy Pelosi reversed herself (as
Speaker Dennis Hastert did on the same issue in 2000, at the request
of Bill Clinton).
Democrats are coming face to face with the fact that there’s a war
on — and that Americans prefer success to failure. If the choice is
between stalemate and withdrawal, as it seemed to be in November 2006,
they may favor withdrawal; but if the choice is between victory and
withdrawal, they don’t want to quit — or to undermine the effort.
Last week, Democrat Niki Tsongas won a special election with only 51
percent of the vote, in a Massachusetts district where John Kerry won
57 percent in 2004 and would have run much better in 2006. History
doesn’t stand still — we’re not in 2006 anymore.