Page 2 of 2 One last thrust in
Iraq By Robert Dreyfuss
war, but there are hints that Congress
might not stand for it, and the leadership of the
US Armed Forces is opposed.
Over the past
few days, a swarm of Republican senators has come
out against the surge, including at least three up
for re-election in 2008 in states that make them
vulnerable: Gordon Smith of Oregon, whose
remarkable speech calling the war "criminal" went
far beyond the normal bland rhetoric of discourse
in the US capital, along with John Sununu of New
Hampshire and
Norm
Coleman of Minnesota.
In addition, Saxby
Chambliss of Georgia, less vulnerable but still
facing voters in 2008, has questioned the surge
idea. And a host of Republican moderates - Chuck
Hagel, Dick Lugar, Susan Collins - have lambasted
it. (Hagel told conservative columnist Robert
Novak: "It's Alice in Wonderland. I'm absolutely
opposed to the idea of sending any more troops to
Iraq. It is folly.")
Even Sam Brownback,
one of the Senate godfathers of the neo-con-backed
Iraqi National Congress, has expressed skepticism,
saying: "We can't impose a military solution."
According to Novak, only 12 of the 49 Republican
senators are now willing to back Senator John
McCain's blood-curdling cries for sending in more
troops.
Meanwhile, says Novak, the
Democrats would not only criticize the idea of a
surge but, led by Senator Joe Biden, chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee, might use their
crucial power over the purse. "Biden," writes
Novak, "will lead the rest of the Democrats not
only to oppose a surge but to block it."
Reports The Financial Times of London:
"Democrats have hinted that they could use their
control over the budget process to make life
difficult for the Bush administration if it
chooses to step up the military presence in Iraq."
A Kagan-style surge would require a vast new
commitment of funds, and with their ability to
scrutinize, put conditions on, and even strike out
entire line items in the military budget and the
Pentagon's supplemental requests, the Democrats
could find ways to stall or halt the "surge", if
not the war itself.
Indeed, if Bush opts
to Kaganize the war, he will throw down the
gauntlet to the Democrats. Unwilling until now to
say that they would even consider blocking
appropriations for the Iraq war, the Democrats
will have little choice but to up the ante if Bush
flouts the electoral mandate in such a
full-frontal manner. By escalating the war in the
face of near-universal opposition from the public,
the military, and the political class, the
president would force the Democrats to escalate
their own - until now fairly mild-mannered -
opposition to the war.
However, it's
possible - just possible - that what Bush is
planning to announce will be something a bit more
Machiavellian than the straightforwardly manly
thrust Kagan wants. Perhaps, just perhaps, he will
order an increase of something like 20,000 troops,
but put a tight time limit on this surge - say,
four months. Perhaps he will announce that he is
giving Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that
much time to square the circle in Iraq: crack down
on militias and death squads, purge the army and
police, develop a plan to fight the Sunni
insurgency, find a formula to deal with the Kurds
and the explosive, oil-rich city of Kirkuk they
claim as their own, un-de-Ba'athify Iraq, and
create a workable formula for sharing the
fracturing country's oil wealth.
By
surging those 20,000 troops into a hopeless
military nowhere-land, Bush will say that he is
giving Maliki room to accomplish all that -
knowing full well that none of it can, in fact, be
accomplished by the weak, sectarian, Shi'ite-run
regime inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. So,
some time in the late spring, the United States
could begin to un-surge its troops and start the
sort of orderly, phased withdrawal that Baker and
the Carl Levin Democrats have called for.
Levin suggested as much as 2006 ended. "A
surge which is not part of an overall program of
troop reduction that begins in the next four to
six months would be a mistake," said Levin, who
will chair the Armed Services Committee. "Even if
the president is going to propose to temporarily
add troops, he should make that conditional on the
Iraqis reaching a political settlement that
effectively ends the sectarian violence."
That may be too much to ask for a
Christian-crusader president still lodged inside a
bubble universe and determined to crush all
evildoers. And it may be too clever by half for an
administration that has been as utterly inept as
this one.
At the same time, it may also be
too much to expect that the Democrats will really
go to the mat to fight Bush if, Kagan-style, he
orders a surge that is "long and large". Maybe
they will merely posture and fulminate and
threaten to ... well, hold hearings.
If
so, it will be the Iraqis who end the war. It will
be the Iraqis who eventually kill enough Americans
to break the US political will, and it will be the
Iraqis who sweep away the ruins of the Maliki
government to replace it with an anti-American,
anti-US-occupation government in Iraq. That is
basically how the war in Vietnam ended, and it
wasn't pretty.
Robert Dreyfuss
is the author of Devil's Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He
covers national security for Rolling Stone and
writes frequently for The American Prospect,
Mother Jones, and The Nation and writes the blog
The Dreyfuss Report at his website.
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