Iraq and Obama

As events start to move faster and faster, they can't help running into each other and influencing each other for better or worse. If nothing else, sheer juxtaposition forces one issue or event to comment on another. Frank Rich this week offers a mash-up of the Republican filibuster against the Senate's impotent anti-surge resolution and Obama's announcement of his presidential candidacy. He headlines his piece with a command: "Stop Him Before He Gets More Experience."

If time in the United States Senate is what counts for presidential seasoning, maybe [Obama's] two years' worth is already too much. Better he get out now, before there's another embarrassing nonvote on a nonbinding measure about what will soon be a four-year-old war.

History is going to look back and laugh at last week's farce, with the Virginia Republican John Warner voting to kill a debate on his own anti-surge resolution and the West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd seizing the occasion for an hourlong soliloquy on coal mining. As the Senate pleasured itself with parliamentary one-upmanship, the rate of American casualties in Iraq reached a new high.

In what was perhaps a backhanded slap to Timothy Noah, Rich takes a look at various plans to leave Iraq and assesses their chances.

But he has no messianic pretensions and is enough of a realist to own up to the fact that his proposal has no present chance of becoming law. Nor do any of the other end-the-war plans offered by Congressional Democrats - some overlapping his, some calling for a faster exit than his. If a nonbinding resolution expressing mild criticism of President Bush's policy can't even come to a vote in the Senate, legislation demanding actual action is a nonstarter. All the Democrats' parrying about troop caps, timelines, benchmarks, the cutting off of war funding, whatever, is academic except as an index to the postures being struck by the various presidential hopefuls as they compete for their party's base. There simply aren't 60 votes in the Senate to force the hand of a president who, in Mr. Obama's words, "is hellbent on doing what he's been doing for the last four years."

Obama points out, however, that quickly passing an endgame may not be the primary point of the various resolutions.

The real point of every Iraq proposal, Mr. Obama observes, is to crank up the political heat until "enough pressure builds within the Republican Party that they essentially revolt." He argues that last week's refusal to act on a nonbinding resolution revealed just how quickly that pressure is building. If the resolution didn't matter, he asks, "why were they going through so many hoops to avoid the vote?" He seconds Chuck Hagel's celebrated explosion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when "he pointed at folks" and demanded that all 100 senators be held accountable for their votes on what Senator Hagel called "the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam."

That's why Mr. Obama is right when he says that the individual 2008 contests for the Senate and the House are at least as important as the presidential race when it comes to winding down the war: "Ultimately what's going to make the biggest difference is the American people, particularly in swing districts and in Republican districts, sending a message to their representatives: This is intolerable to us."

This is another instance in which events are likely to overtake one another. Whatever the Senate is or isn't able to do, the as the situation deteriorates in Iraq, that will have an influence of its own. Rich expands on the idea.

My own guess is that the Republican revolt will be hastened more by the harsh reality in Iraq than any pressure applied by Democratic maneuvers in Congress. Events are just moving too fast. While senators played their partisan games on Capitol Hill, they did so against the backdrop of chopper after chopper going down on the evening news. The juxtaposition made Washington's aura of unreality look obscene. Senator Warner looked like such a fool voting against his own principles ("No matter how strongly I feel about my resolution," he said, "I shall vote with my leader") that by week's end he abruptly released a letter asserting that he and six Republican colleagues did want a debate on an anti-surge resolution after all. (Of the seven signatories, five are up for re-election in 2008, Mr. Warner among them.)

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. The latest National Intelligence Estimate said as much when it posited that "even if violence is diminished," Iraq's "absence of unifying leaders" makes political reconciliation doubtful. Not enough capable Iraqi troops are showing up and, as Gen. Peter Pace told the Senate last week, not enough armored vehicles are available to protect the new American deployments. The State Department can't recruit enough civilian officials to manage the latest push to turn on Baghdad's electricity and is engaged in its own sectarian hostilities with the Pentagon. Revealingly enough, the surge's cheerleaders are already searching for post-Rumsfeld scapegoats. William Kristol attacked the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, for "letting the Joint Chiefs slow-walk the brigades in."

Washington's conventional wisdom has it that the worse things go in the war, the more voters will want to stick with the tried and true: Clinton, McCain, Giuliani. But as Mr. Obama reminds us, "Nobody had better Washington résumés than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld." In the wake of the catastrophe they and their enablers in both parties have made, the inexperienced should have a crack at inheriting the earth, especially if they're clean.

We'll see whether Obama can stay out in front of events, especially as the pace seems to pick up.