The Dems found themselves in Pennsylvania this past week. Obama missed yet another opportunity to end the race, losing to Clinton by ten points, a margin just wide enough for her to claim a significant win and soldier on. Considering the state was full of bitter, religious, gun owners, however, Obama might count himself lucky to have lost by only ten. He is also winning the critical spin battle in the media as most stories point out that he trailed by 25 points a month ago. It’s hard to imagine that this victory changes much for Clinton. She will probably win Indiana narrowly while getting trounced in North Carolina and then look to West Virginia and Kentucky to sustain her campaign until the last primary in Puerto Rico. Obama will limp to the finish line holding a lead in delegates, total votes, and states won. Barring some unforgivable gaffe or damaging revelation dug up by the Clinton campaign he will be the nominee of his party. Yet he will leave his convention with none of the momentum that usually accompanies the coronation of a party’s nominee. Instead of enjoying his moment in the sun Obama will be hard at work trying to reach out to those Clinton voters in small town Pennsylvania, 25 percent of whom said they would vote for Mccain rather than Obama.
Whoever it is the Democrats end up nominating, they will likely have to change their tune on the war in Iraq. Let’s recall that it was almost exactly one year ago that Senator Reid told the nation that “this war is lost and the surge isn’t accomplishing anything.” Less than six months later, however, it became abundantly clear that the surge was accomplishing an awful lot. Sectarian violence was drastically reduced, Sunni tribal leaders turned on Al-Qaeda and allied with US forces, and the Shiite militias were confronted and restrained. Faced with these achievements but still politically committed to American failure in Iraq, the Democrats amended their latest critique of the war. They conceded that the United States military was indeed winning the war itself, but argued that the war was no longer the central dimension of the conflict. Rather the only measure of success was political reconciliation between the Shiite-led government and Sunni leaders. This line of argument dominated the latest round of Petraeus hearings. Senator Clinton chose to ignore the undeniable military progress before remarking “The purpose of the surge, let’s not forget, as described by the Bush Administration, was ‘to create the space for the Iraqis to engage in reconciliation and make significant political progress.’” Yet the wheels are quickly coming off this latest critique of the war. Even The New York Times couldn’t keep the newest success stories from Iraq off the front page this past week: “Iraq’s largest Sunni bloc has agreed to return to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki’s cabinet after a boycott of nearly a year.” As if the headline wasn’t bad enough for the dems, the returning Sunnis cited specific reasons for their return, most notably the passage of an amnesty law for Sunnis who left or are seeking to leave the ranks of the insurgents and the recent crackdown on the Shiite militias. If that isn’t reconciliation and significant political progress I don’t know what is.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Ullman (dullman10) // Apr 30, 2008 at 8:09 am
“At least 44 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in April, making it the deadliest month for U.S. forces since September 2007.” http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gkx-3oYeFwuWKCusr2jrojs98w8wD90B3BCG0
Just something to think about.
2 Sam Rudman (srudman09) // Apr 30, 2008 at 9:20 am
I think this is probably the new line the democrats are going to take. They will no longer be able to make the argument about political progress with a straight face,they will have to continue to concede that the war is being won, but begin citing casualty figures and the economic cost of the war without any reference to the recent achievements of our forces. It is also worth pointing out also that US casualties are nowhere near as high as the monthly rates before the surge.
3 Aaron Nathan (anathan10) // Apr 30, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I’ll quickly point out the obvious: the surge might be working to its stated purpose (which I would remind you, is not the original stated purpose of the war, nor the second nor third nor I don’t know how many), but that purpose is vague enough that its success might not be good enough. We sort of already found this out–and it was from Barack Obama himself, asking Petraeus and Crocker why, if the surge was so successful, there was still no way to predict a nearing end date for our troop commitment in Iraq. Our military commitment now seems like a stalling measure; no amount of slow political progress will bring us to the threshold where we may finally leave. With such vague goals, its almost as if the unstated purpose of the surge is to run out the clock on the Bush administration and leave this mess for the next president. It’s a question of time–this kind of policing of Iraqi civil strife might give enough cover for political reconciliation and the creation of a self-sufficient Iraqi state–but it could take a decade or two. Take a vote on that.
Speaking of new lines, this surge thing is an old new line out of the McCain camp. (When you think about it, there are a lot of things about the surge that make as little sense as the original troop commitment. If more troops shorten our commitment and reduce casualties, why wasn’t the surge on the order of 50,000 or 100,000 more troops? And if we don’t have the troop strength to do this thing right, why are we there in the first place?) Just about every rationale we now have for the war is either a post-hoc justification a threat that did not exist in Iraq in the first place. Given that, can’t we finally realize that this particular neoconservative moment has been a disaster? McCain will run another “don’t change horses in midstream” campaign, except the stream has long since been a flash flood, and the horse drowned in the first Bush administration. It’s time to build an ark.
4 yizhou10 (yizhou10) // May 1, 2008 at 2:08 am
Although I’m not a big fan of the war on Iraq it strikes me that the current discourse in the Democratic Party with regards with what to do about the whole affair is somewhat problematic. Implicit in the promises of both leading Democrats to set solid deadlines for an American withdrawal is the suggestion that America has already lost. Even if the goals are vague, and the costs are mounting, I have to wonder for a moment what it would look like if American troops were to pull out in 2010, around the time we would graduate. It strikes me that Iraq, and the Middle East would be thrown into chaos, seeing a huge upsurge in violence at the very least, and a full blown sectarian civil war at the very worst.
Having entered Iraq on essentially illegitimate grounds, it is now incumbent upon the United States to leave only when it can be relatively certain that no bloodbath will ensue. Unfortunately, this sounds like an open-ended commitment to troop deployment in Iraq. In truth, no matter how unpleasant that idea may sound, I believe that setting an unrealistic deadline (and any deadline set for a politically palatable timeframe would be unrealistic) for withdrawal is much worse. Even if it is merely a stalling measure, even if it is something that we do not have enough troops to solve in one great push, American deployment should continue until such a time when a troop pullout is strategically advisable.
Iraq has been a disaster to date, faint glimmers of hope notwithstanding. Premature withdrawal could turn it into a disaster of landmark proportions, and should be avoided at all costs.
5 Sam Rudman (srudman09) // May 1, 2008 at 10:55 am
Nathan I think your initial point is a good one; namely that one must recognize that our goals in Iraq have been greatly scaled down. We will not succeed in transforming the entire Middle East. That said, there is still an awful lot at stake in Iraq, and the only way to move forward is to consider where we are at now. Arguments about whether or not “this particular neoconservative moment has been a disaster” do nothing to clarify the options before us. We can withdraw in the face of Al-Qaeda terror, and thereby abandon Iraq to Iran, or we can see through a successful strategy which by all accounts is succeeding on multiple fronts, military and political.
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