QUAGMIRE!
"We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool said to push on."
By Jules Crittenden
Illustration by Roger de Hauteville @ Maggies Farm.
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An American Congress has got itself into a war it can’t win. It is stuck. Can’t move forward, can’t move back. And Congress is starting to take casualties. It doesn’t know which way to turn. It’s a quagmire.
The situation is dire, and congressmen everywhere are increasingly beleaguered. They have been unable to come up with any strategy for success, but more seriously, they haven’t been able to agree on a strategy for failure. One of their leading lights, Rep. John Murtha, has already been reduced to an object of derision and the danger is he will drag more of them down with him.
Congress spent four days … four days! … yammering earnestly, and then cast a strong, uncompromising, forceful non-binding resolution with a self-negating caveat. The president of the United States, in reaction to this devastating congressional shock-and-awe campaign, said, “Thank you, that was interesting.”
Since then, the Senate minority, wielding flimsy, antiquated procedural weapons, has tied down the Democratic juggernaut in the Senate.
The situation is increasingly desperate. Americans, who had seen in the Democratic Congress a chance to extricate themselves from an unpopular conflict, appear to be coming to the conclusion that Bush’s war is a more attractive choice than the Democratic peace. Here are some of the ugly facts on the ground:
Public Opinion Strategies found that 67 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction and 60 percent think Iraq has no future as a stable democracy. But 57% believe “The Iraq War is a key part of the global war on terrorism” and that we have to keep our troops there and finish the job.
Hillary Clinton, trying out out-Obama Obama, is playing to the hard left in classic pre-primary strategy. That would be the 17% who favor immediate withdrawal.
A majority, 56 percent of likely voters, say “Even if they have concerns about his war policies, Americans should stand behind the President in Iraq because we are at war.” And 53 percent say, “The Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw the troops from Iraq.”
Other recent polls have found support for Bush’s troop surge surging, and while opposition to the war is high, so is opposition to (a) surrender, (b) losing, (c) defeat and (d) compelling the troops do do any of them same.
This poses a frightful dilemma for Dem Cong strategists. How to surrender without giving up? How to compel defeat without being seen to cause us to lose?
Little more than a month into what was supposed to be a swift campaign to sure victory, the Democratic Congress is bogged down.
It is becoming increasingly clear that this war cannot be lost politically. It will have to be lost militarily. Hence the only clear Democratic plan to emerge so far: Murtha’s plan to undercut the troops.
There is also an effort to rewrite history to favor the surrender camp, moving the goal post to impose a defacto defeat on the defiant enemy. That would be Biden-Levin to unauthorize the 2002 authorization. The only problem is, there is nothing to indicate this asymmetrical opponent wouldn’t sidestep, or maybe just ignore, that manuever as well! There is also the punt. Any number of backbenchers, from John Kerry to Chris Van Hollen, now joined by skittish frontbencher Hillary, have put forward variations on the Iraq Study Group’s plan for abandonment-lite and negotiations with terrorists.
How does it happen that one of the greatest political powers on Earth, the United States Congress, finds itself bogged down in a quagmire against a politically compromised, chimpy-looking lame duck president?
Congress is unwilling to shed blood in defense of its own beliefs. The great, principled Democratic Congress lacks the strength of its own convictions, and all the rhetoric in the world can’t save it now. It is in a quagmire of its own.
Jules Crittenden is an editor and columnist for the Boston Herald.
Crittenden’s web page is at Forward Movement.
Bonus Feature:
Congressional Reinforcements Surge Into Iraq
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8 Comments
lbphilly:Ed Meese, a member of the Iraq Study Group, spoke in Philadelphia less than two weeks ago. His summary of the ISG’s recommendations was much closer to something reasonable than was reported in the press, and he notes that the President is implementing about 85% of those recommendations.
Meese was volubly unhappy about the media’s distortion of everything surrounding the war.
Feb 22, 2007 - 10:07 am Seth Williams:Nice photoshop, but that would maybe be better expressed as 43%. Or not.
Feb 22, 2007 - 10:50 am David Eaton:I think 2 things are becoming clearer to ‘mainstream’ Dem politicians.
First, opposition to the war in this country may merely reflect opposition to losing. There has always been a fringe anti-war movement, but large scale opposition shouldn’t be read as being part of that. A plausible interpretation of the polling data is that the country supports doing the job that was set out, even if that wasn’t all that well-defined. The American people hate losing. The smartest of the Dems realize that calling for abrupt withdrawal will feel like calling for defeat, and will hand the Democratic party a defeat in turn.
Second, the ‘netroots’ notwithstanding, the Dems have a small majority, not a mandate. Stupidity and corruption can only go on for so long before incumbants will be swept out, and I think that that was done quite convincingly. However, the current group of elected officials was merely deemed less objectionable than what was already there. It seems to me that even an emphatic “NO!” to one side is not evidence of anything with respect to the other.
Moderate Democrats are already grumbling about not being led off the ‘left cliff’. They recognize that to cement power, they’ll have to not do what the last set of bums did to get thrown out.
But the ‘roots demand more, and if not placated, promise to turn ugly. But if they are placated, they could cost Dems the White House.
It promises to be entertaining, in any case. Both major parties are so ideologically constipated that the whole process may collapse in a heap, leaving a third party candidate viable. Whether to feel cheered or despressed, I can’t tell.
Feb 22, 2007 - 11:02 am Pat Buchanatar:About that poll you cite here…
I have to say I’m a little suspicious about a poll from an organization with the acronym POS, but digging deeper I notice a couple of disturbing features in these data.
49 % of the respondents support immediate withdrawal or a fixed timetable irrespective of stability in Iraq.
At the same time,
only 25% agreed with the statement “I don’t care what happens in Iraq after the US leaves, I just want the troops brought home”.
So these 25% are merely moral cretins who don’t even want to think about the thousands of Iraqis who put their necks on the line (literally) to help our mission succeed.
The people who worry me are the 24 % who say they DO care but want to pull the plug anyway. I don’t know where to begin looking for the place in myself where I could condemn to death someone who risked their lives to help my country, and have the moral vanity to feel sorry for them AT THE SAME TIME. These 24% are not just loathsome. They are seriously jacked up as well.
The other weird data point is the 66 % of the respondents who didn’t think that the US would lose its superpower status (question 14). This tells me that many (most?) of the 49% who support withdrawal are part of the 66%, and are telling themselves “it’s OK to lose; we’re still Number One”. Let’s assume that we could make a compelling case for this to be false, i.e., if the US surrendered in Iraq we would become an ordinary power, like France. Would this change any of the pro-withdrawal votes? I see an opportunity for Bush here!
The foregoing assumes that the 31% who DO think we’d lose our superpower status think that would be a bad thing. Some of the 31% who agree with question 14 could be liberals who want us to lose our superpower status. It would have been nice if the poll clarified this for us.
Feb 22, 2007 - 11:16 am Harold Cutler:The Democrates have developed their own quagmire by their own lack of understanding of what the original war was about. It is a war declared by terrorists against the western world. The msn never understood what the terrorists were trying to do and between the liberal politicians and the press we have a serious problem. We were brilliant in Afganistan. We stopped the training camps by Al Quida, then invading Iraq started out brilliant by isolating Iran and Syria and the Palistinians. North Africa was being isolated and Egypt, where it all started with the Moslem Brotherhood, was changing for the better.
Feb 22, 2007 - 12:05 pm zhombre:Then starting with Kerry, Teddy Kennedy, and other “liberals” and the NYT and Wapo giving the terrorists support, the terrorists have been able to regroup.
Iraq is one important battle in the international war against the Muslam terrorist groups.
Our open society is vulnerable to the terrorists and and by running away we are doing just what Ben Laden predicted.
Yeah, Harold, you have to admit the Islamicists may have a point, that democracies are by their nature prone to dissension, the media make it impossible to prosecute a war when that war is constantly scrutinized and the reporting is distorted, and the antiwar elements in the affluent West do not have the stomach for a long war and have a marked tendency to repudiate their own society and their own leaders.
Feb 22, 2007 - 2:25 pm swilcinburn:Buried in this post is a fantastic moniker for our country’s loyal opposition … Dem Cong. Or, even better, Demi Cong. Our very own left wing insurgents!
Feb 22, 2007 - 3:18 pm REN:LOL, I watched the video you posted as your bonus just the other night with my kid brother. I’ve had it on my hard drive for a while now. What a funny coincidence and much more interesting than what’s going on in congress. Then again, I guess it exemplifies the ‘quagmire’ the DEMS haphazardly jumped into.
Feb 22, 2007 - 10:41 pm