WASHINGTON – See you in September. No, make that July. Or wait ’til next year.
It is easier to ignore the cacophony over Iraq War spending than it is to sort out how congressional Democrats – and the American public – are going to achieve their goal of extricating the United States from the military quagmire President Bush has created and in which he seems content to wallow until he leaves office. Dates, timetables, deadlines and benchmarks abound. The latest is a House Democratic leadership plan to quickly pass a no-strings-attached war funding bill to provide money for the troops through July. Then there would be a second vote on more funds, with the condition that the bumbling Iraqi government demonstrate progress toward achieving political goals that its warring factions so far have shown no willingness to meet.
Maybe the standoff pitting the Bush administration’s insistence on an open-ended military commitment in Iraq against the Democrats’ insistence that it be brought to something resembling a conclusion will end this summer. Don’t count on it.
There is only one date that truly, predictably and cynically matters to the people who are now responsible for prolonging the American agony in Iraq – that is, congressional Republicans. That day is Nov. 4, 2008.
It’s the date every member of Congress will stand again before the voters. It is the date on which Republicans will attempt to take back control of the House and Senate, which fell into Democratic hands largely because of the public’s fury about Iraq.
Which is why this September is the new “surrender date.” That is the epithet Republicans hurl at Democrats who press a timetable for a drawdown of troops. More aptly, it describes the time of the congressional Republicans’ eventual political surrender. You could call it their drop-dead date. If things in Iraq do not improve enough over the next three months, they will be forced to choose whether they want to be re-elected or go down with Bush.
Understand that it’s the Republicans in Congress who, more than Bush, now keep the American military pinned down by the bloody status quo in Iraq. They could have voted for the $124 billion Iraq and Afghanistan funding bill in March, with its guideposts for changing U.S. policy in Iraq. As a group, they didn’t. They could have voted to override the president’s veto of the spending measure. They didn’t.
They have tied their political fortunes to those of Bush, whose public standing is so low it prompts comparisons to Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.
But in September, it will be a year before the campaign of 2008 is at full throttle. If they act, there will be enough time for Republicans to claim they’ve forged a new policy in Iraq. They might even be photographed with returning troops.
The September non-surprise is foreshadowed in the hints of moderate Republican senators who have long groused about the war but haven’t backed their rhetoric with their votes. More significantly, it is heard from House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio. He is no moderate and he does not have in the House a substantial cadre of Republican moderates whose political futures he must worry about. Most of them were defeated last year.
No, Boehner has to worry about an electoral bloodbath for his party in 2008. “By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn’t, what’s plan B?” Boehner told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” There is no Plan B. There has been none since the original Plan A, which was premised on removing Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, collapsed. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group suggested a Plan B last fall but Bush, backed by congressional Republicans, rejected it. Many outside experts and some foreign governments have suggested Plan Bs. They’ve been rejected. The voters thought they might begin to implement Plan B when they turned to Democrats last fall, but Republicans have blocked that, too.
By September, if current casualty trends continue, hundreds more American service men and women will have died and about 1,500 additional troops will have been wounded. The additional 35,000 troops the Pentagon has just called up will have begun arriving in Iraq in August and be expected, according to military planners, to stay there well into 2008.
But September will be hard upon us, and so congressional Republicans will try to figure out whatever it is that might become their Plan B.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com.
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group
