Sometime between January and November of next year, probably beginning in March, U.S. troop levels in Iraq will drop precipitously. The reason for this is that, as I noted back in April — well before Hearst Newspapers cottoned on to the scam — the combination of The Surge and extended deployments means we’ll have in the neighborhood of 200,000 troops there by the end of this year.
That number isn’t sustainable, so predicting that the administration will see sufficient signs of progress to begin noisily “withdrawing” as many as 70,000 troops, which would bring the numbers down to where they’ve been for most of the past four years, doesn’t require much of a crystal ball.
Republicans are in trouble on Iraq and they won’t nominate a candidate who genuinely wants out of the mess; the best they can hope for is a faux withdrawal sufficiently splashy, and coincident with something less than a total implosion of Iraq, that they can attempt to spin it as the product of success. The charade will also suit the purposes of many congressional Democrats — and possibly the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, depending on who that is — since they can pretend that their ineffectual gestures toward bringing the U.S. occupation to an end are bearing some fruit.
70,000 troops is a lot, even if only a bit more than a third of the total they’ll be subtracted from, so if things in Iraq continue to go south at the current, somewhat leisurely pace, there’s a chance that some combination of voter confusion over the meaning of the reduction, disgust at the ongoing unwillingness of the mass of congressional Democrats to acquire black market spines, and admiration for the belated coming to Jesus of Republicans such as Voinovich and Lugar, the two generally understated GOP senators who only this week noticed something amiss with the administration’s plan, might stave off electoral disaster for the Republicans.
That’s in addition to what’s left of the GOP election-gaming machine, which has been taking some hits during the investigation into the conversion of the Justice Department into the dirty-tricks arm of the Republican National Committee, but whose most experienced operatives are still at large if not in office.
Lugar and Voinovich are advocating a military disengagement from Iraq on the basis that the current policy, such as it is, is counterproductive. That it took Lugar, who is regarded by eternal Washingtonians as the most astute foreign policy voice among congressional Republicans, four years to arrive at this point is both a measure of the party’s collective insanity and a bellwether of the impact that the withdrawal of those 70,000 troops will enjoy: he’s gone as far as he’s willing to go, he’ll accept the withdrawal as evidence that the administration has (yet again) changed course, and his approval of it, when it comes, will provide safe harbor for other Republicans. They’ll be able to say that they agree with the wise senator that a change had to come and lo, it came, and without any quarrelsome legislation mandating it.
They’ll be able to peacefully coexist with fellow Republicans who argue the opposite point, that The Surge was a success and the troops are coming out because they’re no longer needed. Voters inclined toward Republicans will have two menu items to choose from: either the escalation worked, hurrah, or the administration have come to their senses, hurrah. Either their representatives did the right thing and stuck with the administration when it counted, or they did the right thing and pressured the administration into seeing reason.
That’s if nothing particularly bad, relatively speaking, beyond the pedestrian carnage to which we’re now more or less inured, happens between now and then. Voters continue to outpace Congress in recognizing the folly of the occupation and the insanity of its genesis, so if things get dramatically worse, which is more likely than not, they won’t be distracted by the sideshows. The press will be, or at least the pundit population, but they’ve lost their mojo on Iraq (it went in search of their minds).
There are other issues that threaten to depress the GOP turnout: corruption in the ranks, dementia and incompetence in the executive branch and so on. And there’s always the possibility that we will yet attack Iran, particularly now that Congress have said okey-dokey to that notion. Democrats would deserve a large measure of blame for the consequences of an attack on Iran, but would probably escape immediate political punishment for it because they didn’t actually pull the trigger.
So it’s yet possible that Democrats will enjoy a stirring electoral victory by default, which is close to the worst possible outcome for anyone who hopes for an actual counter-revolution, however gentle, in the conduct of our nation’s affairs both foreign and domestic.
But there’s a genie in the corner. More on that later.
