It Starts and Ends with Iraq

Despite the sideshow of the Democratic House leadership race (which was far less of an edge-of-your-seat contest than the Republican Senate leadership election, in which Trent Lott returned to a top position over Tennessee's Lamar Alexander by one measly vote), as Frank Rich points out, the real story is all about Iraq. He reveals all in the column title: "It's Not the Democrats Who Are Divided."

[T]he most telling barometer is the election's defining issue: there is far more unanimity among Democrats about Iraq than there is among Republicans. Disengaging America from that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on Nov. 7, and that's what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up, whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it.

Even before they officially take over, the Democrats are trying to deliver on this pledge. Carl Levin and Joe Biden, among the party's leaders in thinking through a new Iraq policy, are gravitating toward a long-gestating centrist exit strategy: a phased withdrawal starting in four to six months; a loosely federal Iraqi government that would ratify the de facto separation of the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds and fairly allocate the oil spoils; and diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy to engage Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, in securing some kind of peace.

None of these ideas are radical, novel or much removed from what James Baker's Iraq Study Group is expected to come up with. All are debatable and all could fail. At this late date, only triage is an option, not "victory." There's no panacea to end the civil war that four years of American bumbling have wrought. But the one truly serious story to come out of the election — far more significant than the Washington chatter about "divided Democrats" — is that the president has no intention of changing his policy on Iraq or anything else one iota.

Any change we see in our policy toward Iraq is entirely dependent on getting the Republicans together to move in one direction or another. Rich offers a number of examples of Repubs who want to move in the same direction as the Dems, including the bipartisan (though we shall see just how much) Iraq Study Group headed up by James Baker. But The Prez is showing no indication that he's willing to reconsider his current direction of adding fuel to the fire and hoping things will get better. The Bushies may claim that "Stay the Course" is no longer their message, but it's only the words that have changed and not their meaning. There'll be no immediate change in policy.

So what then? A Democratic Congress can kill judicial appointments but cannot mandate foreign policy. The only veto it can exercise is to cut off the war's funding, political suicide that the Congressional leadership has rightly ruled out. The plain reality is that the victorious Democrats, united in opposition to the war and uniting around a program for quitting it, have done pretty much all they can do. Republican leaders must join in to seal the deal.

Don't count Mr. McCain among them. His call for more troops even when there are no more troops is about presidential politics, a dodge that allows him to argue in perpetuity that we never would have lost Iraq if only he had been heeded from the start. True or not, that gets America nowhere now. Look instead to two other Republican military veterans in the Senate, one who is not running for president and one who yet might. The first is John Warner, who said a month before the election that he would seek an overhaul of Iraq policy in 60 to 90 days if there was no progress. The second is Chuck Hagel, who has been prescient about the war's potential pitfalls since 2002 and started floating exit strategies parallel to the Levin-Biden track last summer.

We'll see what kind of compromise anybody on the Republican side of the aisle will be willing to make. That'll be the only place we'll see any possibility in a shift of Iraq policy.

And thanks once again to Wealthy Frenchman for making Frank Rich available.