No New Thing Under the Sun

George Packer absolutely nails the Groundhog Day quality of the Iraq debate:

This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.

The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

Yes, precisely. One could add that at each point we've seen a certain faction of timid Democrats or quivering liberals who manage to forget everything they've learned about Bush, about Iraq, and about the dynamics of the war. At some point, though, it needs to stop.

Comments

Patreaus and Crocker could both say we have to leave today because we won (or we lost) and we would stay. Bush is not leaving. Why should he?

Posted by Peter Driscoll | September 8, 2007 12:10 PM

Is Petraeus still gonna be commander when Edwards/Obama/Clinton take office in 2009? If so, that will be very interesting.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | September 8, 2007 12:36 PM

The real groundhog day quality of the Iraq debate is that I have the same frustrated/angry reaction to Packer's attitude to the anti-war left that I had to his mother's reaction to the anti-VietNam war protestors at Stanford nearly forty years ago.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | September 8, 2007 12:36 PM

"...timid Democrats and quivering liberals..."

Exactly. It's the 'one-percent doctrine' in reverse: if there is a one percent chance that they could be wrong, quivering, timid liberals will cave.

But Peter Driscoll (above comment) is right: Bush won't leave even if victory were to be unanimously declared. It's not a political victory (eg, the democratization of the middle east, the destruction of AQI, etc.) he's after. It's about access to the oil, something Bush conceded in his latest speech. And that requires a long term presence.

Posted by scudbucket | September 8, 2007 1:24 PM

The groundhoggishess is more in the fact that every time such a moment is about to come to pass, the liberals become convinced that somehow this time finally the Dem leaders are suddenly going to shed their spinelessness, fear and cowardice and stand up to the warmongers.

Never happens. Starting from the 2000 election fiasco, the Dem leaders have never failed to live up to the stereoype of small men as the Republicans always portray them.

Posted by gregor | September 8, 2007 1:41 PM

Whoever rules Iraq, will they not sell the oil the control? Will they forgo $25 million a year?

The administration might be concerned that a share of that revenue go the American-owned oil companies. But it shouldn't be worried that the oil will be sold, regardless of whether American troops are present there or not.

The fear must be that even a Democratic president will keep troops on the ground in Iraq. It's quite likely that when the troops go, the civil war will intensify. When it does, the president will be blamed. To avoid that blame, the president may hang in there.

The American public apprehends that a bloodbath might ensue after our withdrawal, and for this reason opposes a rapid withdrawal.

Richardson is right on the merits. But there's good reason why he won't be nominated or elected, just as there is good (political) reason why the next president probably won't do the right thing and withdraw expeditiously.

Posted by Gloomster | September 8, 2007 1:42 PM

Gene O'Grady:

Packer's mother taught at Stanford? Could you tell us more?

Posted by Leah | September 8, 2007 2:00 PM

Gloomster,
The most recent legislation passed by Iraq granted 78% of oil revenue to the western oil companies engaged in extraction and processing.

Re: the central role of oil in US 'stay the course' policy, there's this (chosen at random from a Google search) from WaPo 11/6/06:

Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel."

(snip)

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Saturday that Bush's latest argument does not reflect a real shift. "We're still not saying we went into Iraq for oil. That's not true," he said. "But there is the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it could be destabilizing for the region."

Posted by scudbucket | September 8, 2007 2:03 PM

i've mentioned this before and i'll say it again: matthew is discovering, in real time, why a certain class of lefty went, basically, crazy in the late '60s and early '70s: there was no way to stop the war in vietnam.

noting that "at some point, it needs to stop" is remarkably optimistic on matthew's point: no, it doesn't, and it won't without some profound shifts in the political and pundit class.

Posted by howard | September 8, 2007 2:19 PM

I think it's really time to start considering the possibility that it's not a bunch of "quivering Democrats" who can't read polls, but rather the fact that either:

a) they actually do believe we should stay in Iraq

or

b) various interest groups (e.g. AIPAC, military industrial complex, big oil), and large contributors are putting heavy pressure on them to stay in Iraq, since withdrawal from Iraq means Iran wins and reduces the chance of an Iran attack.

The fact that the Dem Congress/Senate has (by omission) given Cheney carte blanche to attack Iran tells you everything you need to know about what's really going on here.

Posted by quietpc3400 | September 8, 2007 5:08 PM

I agree. It's over.

The Democrats are NOT going to get the US out of Iraq.

Instead, they are going to get us INTO IRAN.

And then they are NOT going to get us OUT OF IRAN OR Iraq.

It's that simple, folks.

Move on to something new. It's a done deal.

All the blogging and analysis of every little move in the Iraq war game is pointless now.

It's over.

We lost.

Deal with it.

You are POWERLESS to stop what is going on in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine and anyplace else the US decides to start a war in.

Utterly powerless.

The military-industrial-security-finance-oil complex OWNS this country.

You are OWNED. (Or in hacker speak, "pwned".)

Only a top to bottom clean out of the US government could even BEGIN to reverse this situation.

You better hope Iran or bin Laden figures out how to steal an Israeli nuclear weapon, smuggle it into the US, and nuke Washington if you ever hope to see this country "clean" again in human history.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 8, 2007 9:43 PM

My post reminded me of a quote from the movie "Gorky Park", in which Lee Marvin, playing the villain of the piece, Jack Osbourne, tells William Hurt:

"You see, corruption is part of us.
All of us.
The very heart of us."

Nicely sums up the condition of the United States today.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 8, 2007 9:47 PM

I guess I'm not that surprised that the war continues to drag on. National governments are just incredibly averse to ending bad wars into which they have already poured a substantial investment. They are like gambling addicts who will keep pumping money into the one-armed bandit until it pays off, or until someone else cuts them off or hauls them away. They tend not to call a war off until they have been whipped by the other side, or something really catastrophic happens economically or politically. Otherwise the forces of political inertia and institutional commitment are overwhelming.

Nobody likes to fail or lose, and as long as you keep postponing the date at which you finally declare failure, you haven't yet officially failed, and you can keep hoping for a miracle. It's probably even harder for a democratic country to end a bad war than an autocratic one. In an autocratic government, the leaders can be like the chief physician in the emergency room who finally says "I'm calling this" after it has become clear that efforts to resuscitate the patient are not going to succeed. In a democracy, responsibility for the war is diffused among a much broader group of people, all of whom have made career investment, reputation investments and ego investments in the war.

That's what gives you people like O'Hanlon: a middling, middle-of-the-road technocrat, ordinarily inclined toward politically safe, received wisdom and unimaginative bureaucratic rationality, whose posture and arguments are becoming increasingly preposterous as he struggles against all hope that his reputation is not doomed to go down in historical flames along with the rest of the party of fools who talked the country into a disastrous empire-ending war.

Posted by Dan Kervick | September 9, 2007 12:49 AM

"The fact that the Dem Congress/Senate has (by omission) given Cheney carte blanche to attack Iran tells you everything you need to know about what's really going on here."

Well said. We're a one party state, and how could it be otherwise when all of our whore-a-ticians get "campaign contributions" from the same fat cats/special interests.

One party - the Republicratic Party.

Posted by kafka | September 9, 2007 11:24 AM

Well, we can damn quivering Democrats as long as we like. But that misses the real fight, which is the attempt to pry 10+ Republican senators away from the direction of the White House.

You have some like Hagel or Smith who are already off the reservation. But while McConnell can count on a solid 44 or so Republican senators, Congress only has defunding as an option - and the Democrats will go there at about the same time Bush will go to a draft.

The majority of the Republican senators are making a calculation that the political optics (Anbar awakening, confusion over casualties) can be presented in such a way that the probability of a rout in 2008 is low. So long as they continue to hold to this view, the White House will be able to continue gaining six month extensions. It isn't pretty, but it's how the game is played.

Posted by Andrew | September 9, 2007 3:22 PM