« September 2006 | Main

Meet the New House - Same as the Old House?

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If so, you’ll probably find me there trying to work on blog entries, one day. The combination of work and life projects left me woefully unable to keep up with the intricacies of November’s elections - which was probably good for my mood, really. Despite John Kerry’s stalwart last-ditch attempt to lose the election for the Democrats, we now have a Democratic House, and a technically Democratic Senate - what can we expect?

I don’t know what you were thinking, but I’m feeling pretty dubious, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. In an election where Iraq was on the minds of most voters, the Democrats as a party haven’t convinced me that they really can offer what matters most - a clear understanding of what they can - and can’t - achieve in that wretched mess.

Don’t get me wrong. At this point, I think the choices left are between ‘Oh crap’, ‘Oh shit’, and ‘Oh no’. Or to put it in more elegant terms, there is no good choice. So, if it is given that the Democrats can offer no magic strategy we are left to find the ‘least worst’ option. The problem is, while some in the Democratic establishment understand this, quite a few do not appear to.

Maybe it’s only to be expected. The ‘troops out now’ option has been gathering strength thanks to spiraling violence and instability. From a political standpoint, there’s almost no capital to be gained from a perceived ‘stay the course’ strategy (Where anything other than ‘get the troops out’ is equated with ‘staying the course’) - especially if you’re a Democrat. Finding a Dem who’s willing to increase troop numbers in Iraq is like finding a Republican interested in meaningful lobbying reform. So I had high hopes when the top Generals in Iraq came to testify at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago. With a new atmosphere in Washington, would they finally come out and say they wanted troop cuts?

Well, not quite. In fact, General John Abizaid came before the Senate Armed Services Committee and rejected both the ‘let’s add more troops’ approach of John McCain and the ‘let’s get all the troops out now’ approach of Carl Levin, Democratic Senator and presumably the head of that same committee once the new Senate is sworn in when January rolls around. It’s hard to put a good face on the immediate troop withdrawal plan when the Generals themselves flatly reject it to your face - under oath and on camera, no less.

So, without the endorsement of the leaders on the ground, the possibility of recommending an immediate troop pullout is starting to recede (though given Bush has no need to worry about re-election and has that all important veto, it was never really a likely outcome in my mind). This of course leaves the Democrats - in fact, the government as a whole, let’s be honest - rooting around for some kind of solution they can present to the American public as offering a way forward. Given that there is no good solution, as previously noted, one must get very creative.

Both parties are now starting to lay the groundwork for the mess that is to come by shifting goals and assigning blame. Some Democrats have been extremely eager to start down this road, which strikes me as a position so deeply rooted in fantasy as to be laughable. Even the Republican neoconservative administrators didn’t have that much gall - mind you, given they gave the orders for disbanding the Iraqi military and carving up of the country’s power base, it would have been a bit hard for them to claim innocence for the result.

Iraq is a failed state at this point, which is a reality which has previously been too bleak to contemplate. Is it the fault of the Iraqi government? Perhaps they can do more than they have, but it is difficult to see how any government or leader could have done well under the circumstances. The American Administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremner failed. The followup appointed government failed. Now the elected government is failing. There is some irony in the fact that life under a dictator was, broadly speaking, safer for an average Iraqi than life under democracy. It makes democracy a tough sell, and shows that calls for the Iraqis to take more responsibility more about dodging blame than offering helpful strategy.

What to do? According to some experts, it’s time to pick a side among Iraq’s warring factions and be done with it. Of all the options, I think this is one likely to get a serious hearing, because on the surface it sounds reasonable. It has the attraction of sounding ‘realistic’ and offers a new way forward. Unfortunately, picking a side is fraught with even worse dangers than dealing with the security situation as it stands and will almost certainly accelerate the fragmentation of Iraq. In the absence of anything from the Democrats that accepts American fault for the current situation, such false pragmatism seems to be what we can expect in the coming months.

I don’t really know what I expected from the Democrats, to be fair to them. I certainly don’t think we’d be in Iraq now if the 2000 election had turned out differently, but that ship has long sailed. Either way, reminding the public of who got us into the mess is no longer enough. The Democrats have two years to prove that they can look beyond the blame and make some tough decisions, and trust in the electorate to remember they were voted into clean up someone else’s mess. So far, it’s a shaky start.

Posted by union_jack at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)