As the Petraeus testimony unfolded last week -- and I do mean last week, because this week's performance is merely the materialization of a rhetorical strategy that's been floating in the air for at least the last few weeks -- I found myself consumed by a deep sense of depression. It turns out, I'm kind of stupid. And that's a bummer.
The realization that I'd been played came upon me last week, growing out of the confluence of 2 related events: a media blitz portraying the surge as successful in reducing violence in Iraq; and Bush's statement that, given this amazing surge success, he thought we would be bringing troops home beginning next summer. Uh-oh, I thought, this is bad; he's going to get to say he's bringing troops home just in time for the election.
Well, of course. But perhaps less obvious is this: in that sense, it doesn't matter whether the surge is working or not working. Liberal bloggers spent the last two weeks diligently -- and persuasively -- deconstructing the violence statistics; they were aided in this by the major newspapers. And shades of their statistical objections were voiced on the Hill over the last two days.
Again, this frustrating sense of always arguing about the wrong thing. Because really, whether the surge is working or not makes absolutely no difference. The surge troop numbers absolutely, positively cannot be sustained past next summer. And that's not even in political terms -- in logistical terms. So, declare victory and pull back, in a kind of military version of "I totally meant to do that".
And where does that leave us? Exactly, precisely where we were before the surge. It will look like a troop reduction, and will in fact be no such thing. But so what -- Bush doesn't mean to pull out, and so he's not going to, and fair enough. But here's what this means for Democrats, and it's a trap that I think there is no chance of avoiding:
1. Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.
2. Hillary's Iraq strategy is hawkish.
3. The Bush "troop reduction" will effectively nullify the distinction between the Democratic and Republican nominees, if Hillary is the Dem's candidate. This problem doesn't apply to anyone but her, but in her case it's devestating. That is to say: her proposal would be for moderate, phased troop withdrawals. Bush is going to give the appearance of doing that for himself. The entire Democratic anti-war advantage is thus, in one fell swoop, handed off to Republicans, and the long-standing electoral meme (of which we seemed briefly, beautifully, to be free) that the parties are exactly the same, will be back with a vengeance. Worse yet, it will effectively be true.
4. Dems will scream a lot about how their candidate wants some percentage more troops out some increment faster than Nominee Romney. This distinction without a difference will be completely lost on the population at large, as it quite properly should be.
5a. Hillary will be defeated at the polls, proving that there truly is no circumstance in which a Democrat can get elected in the post-civil rights era (even Bill Clinton considers Bill Clinton a fluke); OR
5b. Hillary squeaks out an electoral victory after wide airing of a YouTube video of Nominee Romney personally performing a gay marriage ceremony, including a close-up of him choking up while pronouncing the happy pair "man and husband." President Hillary now has two equally hideous choices, either of which will devestate the Democratic party for yet another generation:
i. Remain in Iraq in full force, waiting out the civil war, and pretending that we're damping it down, but really just shifting the pieces on the board as the game goes on for as long as it's going to go on. I call this the Petraeus option.
ii. Remain in Iraq in reduced force, trying to train forces and prevent a "wider regional conflict" while the civil war burns around us. I call this the "High casualties for everyone!" option.
iii. Pull out precipitously and helter skelter, given the armed services' exhaustion and Bush's lack of planning for withdrawal up to this point (see George Packer in this week's New Yorker); whatever this means for Iraq in terms of genocide is unknowable -- but all ugliness that ensues will not only be blamed on Dems, it will also inevitably be linked to Vietnam, and we'll come to own both of these failed wars. This last is a notion that literally makes me sick, on a multitude of levels.
Hillary is a hawk, as I said, and very wary of being tarred with the Vietnam brush. I think she'll avoid iii. unless forced to it by public opinion. But the trap is clear any way you look at it: there is a straight line from Petraeus' "the surge is a success" line to Republicans' trump card against Hillary in '08; and even if that trump card fails, they've got the "Democrats lost the war" narrative in the bag. And from there it's another half century of elections lost for other people's irresponsible behavior.
So either way you look at it, no matter what happens, no matter who wins the next election, there is going to be a substantial (by which I mean in excess of 70,000) troop presence in Iraq for at least 5 years. I should have known this. I should have known it before the last election, when I was fool enough to have hope. I should have known it earlier this summer, when I stupidly thought Dems had a number of opportunities to put pressure on Bush to start drawing down. I should have known it all along. Which is why I feel stupid.
I'm beginning to believe that there is almost no limit to the potential negative repercussions of Hillary Clinton as a presidential nominee. And the fact that there seems to be no way out of ending up with her as the nominee makes me feel stupid in advance.
