How the Democrats Can Win In Iraq

It was all for show:

If President Bush vetoes an Iraq war spending bill as promised, Congress quickly will provide the money without the withdrawal timeline the White House objects to because no lawmaker "wants to play chicken with our troops," Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday.

"My expectation is that we will continue to try to ratchet up the pressure on the president to change course," the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage."

I think Obama is stretching the truth a bit when he says, "no lawmaker wants to play chicken with the troops." Playing chicken with the troops is the preferred Democrat tactic these days, and passing the recent meaningless pork-laden bills through the House and Senate when they know they could not override a veto are concrete examples of this in action.

What Obama perhaps should have said is that no Democrat wants to get caught playing chicken with the troops, as John "Okinawa" Murtha has done several times, first when he accused Marines in Haditha of "cold-blooded murder" well before the investigation had concluded, and just months ago, when he attempted to undercut deployments by the arbitrary setting of readiness standards which would mark units as unfit for combat if they did not have key equipment before deploying.

The later tactic was especially dishonest and calculating, as units typically do not carry certain heavy equipment with them—for example, tanks and IFVs—that are already in Iraq. These assets are turned over to newly arriving units by the units they replace. It is largely because of his record of "playing chicken" that we have heard relatively little from him since his last attempt to use our soldiers as pawns.

Will the Democrats overplay their hand, and go too far once more?

Top Democrats are concerned that they will:

Backed by a unified party and fresh from a slew of legislative victories, Democratic leaders appear to believe there is hardly any territory they cannot stray onto, a development that has Republican political operatives gleeful and some Democrats worried. Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned of a "political price" at the polls: "If they let their constituents and their ideology drive them past the point where the American people are comfortable, they will find how quickly the voters will react."

Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.

"That's where their strength is," Panetta said. "If they go into total confrontation mode on these other things, where they just pass bills and the president vetoes them, that's a recipe for losing seats in the next election."

Notes Ed Morrissey:

The Democrats are about to retreat on Iraq war spending, after giving Bush an opportunity for an easy veto. It's bad enough that the Democrats played a game of chicken that they couldn't possibly win the last two weeks. They compounded the error by larding the final bills up with so much pork that Bush can now easily justify the veto on the grounds of containing corruption -- and make the Democrats look as if they will only fund the troops if they can get their own snouts into the trough as well.

Citing the same article, Dan Riehl wryly notes:

According to the Washington Post, while America is struggling with two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the war on terror, the Democrats are planning to broaden the front by increasing their attacks... on Bush.

The left end of the Democrat Party tips their hand to show they are uniting against their "true enemy," George W. Bush, once more. Perhaps, though, our nation’s best chance for victory in Iraq is for more moderate and conservative Democrats to change tactics on Iraq if the current Baghdad security plan begins to bear fruit later this summer.

If the "surge" shows signs of success, Democrats can turn on a dime to attack the Administration for not employing the COIN strategy advocated by General Petraeus far earlier in the war. They can then legitimately maintain that they support the troops and Iraq, and claim they are still anti-war at the same time by advocating a strategy that proved a successful template in the Malayan Emergency and other previous conflicts, a strategy many experts feel will result in far fewer civilian casualties over the long term.

They can easily justify this stance by stating that the tactics and strategy first created by French Lt. Col David Galula in Algeria in 1956 and adopted by General Petraeus in Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM3-24
as the only real "anti-war" position for a war already engaged, one that will eventually not only win the war in Iraq, but one that will save the most Iraqi lives in the process, and one would avoid fears of both a genocide and a wider regional war that the current Democrat plan of defeat seems to promise.

Many Americans still hold the Democrats responsible for the millions of lives lost as the result of the American pullout of Vietnam after the Viet Cong were effectively destroyed as a result of the Tet Offensive. Conservative Democrats are wary of setting the stage for yet another genocide which would only further erode their reputation on national security issues, and can avoid this label if they can find a way to justify advocating the Petraeus plan. That opportunity may present itself in coming months.

Are Democrats nimble enough to make such a transition? If they are, what will have to occur to make this bit of political jujitsu possible?

First and foremost, the COIN strategy being deployed by General Petraeus must show solid progress in coming months. Galula was able to effect noticeable change in Algeria in a very limited amount of time, and so it is possible for the security operations currently starting to ramp up to start making the desired changes.

Second, the Iraqi political and security apparatus are going to have to show significant signs of progress as well. There is reason to believe this is possible.

The al Anbar "Awakening" discussed at Acute Politics and elsewhere shows that a growing number of Sunni tribes in the most volatile province of Iraq are interested in change, and in political discussion. If they can be effectively engaged politically and find a voice for their concerns through the political process, this will be a blow to insurgent recruiting and to al Qaeda terrorists, who long relied upon Sunni support. This support for al Qaeda is failing rapidly, as a growing string of Sunni tribal attacks on the terror organization—including an attack yesterday that killed 21 members of al Qaeda by Iraqi security forces and Sunni tribesmen—shows the situation on the ground is evolving against outside Sunni influence.

Concurrently, Iran’s network supporting Shia forces are being rolled up at an astonishing rate, with more than 300 operatives captured in the past two months alone. There is little doubt that many of these arrests have come from intelligence provided by Iranian Quds Force soldiers captured in Iraq, but more quietly, nationalistic Iraqi Shia are turning against Iranian influence and proving tips leading to the compromise of Iranian operatives and operations.

The collapse of the relationship between al Qaeda and their former Shia allies and the turning of Iraqi Shia against Iranian influence is a good start, but only a start. The Iraqi government is going to have to find ways of engaging Sunnis, Baathists, and the "good” JAM Shia militias, and incorporate them into the political process, which will be exceedingly difficult and will not happen quickly. Many Americans will find the negotiations distasteful, but such a reconciliation is necessary, and it always has been.

If the political and military conditions do evolve as stated—and I readily admit that that is a very big "if"—Democrats have the opportunity to shift positions to envelop the Republicans in a political pincers movement. They will be able to outflank the Republicans with a pro-victory position that points out the long-running incompetence of the Administration in handling the war to this point, while evolving their position to match conditions on the ground to support a victory that Democrats can claim political credit for.

This of course will be a hard sell to many of the more stridently anti-war/pro-defeat Democrats, but for those that are more pragmatic, it affords an opportunity to reestablish national security bona files that have been languishing since the Vietnam War.

To pull this off, Steny Hoyer and the Blue Dog Democrats will have to play a vital role in persuading Nancy Pelosi that a victory in Iraq is in the party's best interests, and with Pelosi's well-known views, this may be a very tough sell. If it could work, however, the Democrats would be in a far better position in 2008 to win even more seats in the House and Senate. Democrat candidates running for President—especially Hillary Clinton—could stand to evolve their platforms to pick up votes from conservative voters, votes that would not be on the table otherwise.

In short, if the conditions on the ground over coming months indicate that success in Iraq is possible, Democrats that can read the tea leaves and adapt to a pro-victory position stand to route a bumbling Republican Party, relegating it to the sidelines for decades to come.