Note to Democrats: Weakness on War Dooms Party

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Note to Democrats: Weakness on War Dooms Party
Art Levine
Posted September 13, 2007 | 02:05 AM (EST)


The current Democratic weakness in opposing Bush's war could have fatal long-term consequences for the party -- as well as for our troops -- now that Democrats have largely abandoned efforts to push for firm timelines on withdrawal. (Today, The Washington Post reports, this cave-in to Bush is being repackaged as "incremental" change.)

By allowing the war to drag on with over 100,000 troops likely to be in place by next November, the party is dooming itself to long-term disaster, unless Congressional Democrats find the will to effectively oppose the war (if pushed successfully by anti-war groups). That's because the complete unraveling of Iraq and much of the Middle East will likely take place on their watch, not under Bush, when a Democratic president begins large-scale pullouts on behalf of a public clamoring for change, a long-overdue withdrawal that will take place without the necessary planning for a safe, fully-funded, responsible withdrawal that should have started years ago.

Instead, since taking office, they've veered off-course and failed to effectively make the case for a timetable withdrawal from Iraq that most Americans want.

As Juan Cole astutely points out this week:

The central question is whether the Democrats can force a significant reduction of troops from Iraq on Bush's watch, so as to avoid Iraq becoming exclusively their headache when they (as is likely) take over the White House in January of 2009. If they could, this drawdown would be the best option. Certainly, that is what a majority of Iraqis thinks, according to the new BBC/ABC poll.


But the answer is: No. The Democrats cannot get the troops out of Iraq because they cannot overturn a Bush veto in the House of Representatives, and because they cannot overcome the need for a consensus of 60 senators in the Senate. Some Democrats, such as Joe Lieberman, oppose a rapid withdrawal. And the likelihood that 11 Republican senators will suddenly become withdrawalniks between now and November, 2008, is negligible.

The testimony of Petraeus and Crocker may marginally reinforce the will of the Republicans to stay the course, but I do not think it is decisive. In all likelihood, the Republican senators would have continued to block their Democratic colleagues from doing anything really dramatic, anyway.

If the Democrats cannot prevail in withdrawing before Bush goes out of office (and they cannot), and if they then rapidly draw down the troops on taking office in 2009, they face the real prospect of a "Gerald Ford meltdown" of the sort that occurred in 1975 when the North Vietnamese and their VC allies took over South Vietnam.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/note-to-democrats-weakne_b_64225.html