The NYT has an intriguing item on the front page today about a Bush administration that appears to be slowly realizing that its current war policy is unsustainable. GOP lawmakers are scared out of their minds, troop deployments effectively run out in April, the electorate is outraged, and there appears to be a growing sense within the administration that the president should get out in front of the inevitable changes.
White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities. (emphasis added)
Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing. […]
[S]ome aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
Notice, the debate is over whether Bush will announce an “intention” to withdraw, not over whether a withdrawal plan will actually be unveiled.
Nevertheless, one senior administration official said the Bush gang expects the political conditions to get worse (“it looks pretty grim”), which might spur the White House to be proactive.
“Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point,” the official said. “Lots of people are concluding that the president has got to get out ahead of this train.”
The White House has even come up with a new euphemism.
They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”
It’s not a withdrawal, or a troop drawdown, it’s a “post-surge redeployment.” If Cheney, Rove, & Co. pursue this, I expect them to argue, with a straight face, that this was part of the plan all along. The “surge” was the first step; this was the second. (For the record, I don’t even think the most sycophantic 28-percenters will buy this.)
The Times article also touched on a possibility I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere.
“Everyone’s particularly worried about what happens when McCain gets back from Iraq,” one official said, a reference to the latest trip to Baghdad by Senator John McCain, who has been a stalwart supporter of the “surge” strategy. Mr. McCain’s travels, and his political troubles in the race for the Republican nomination for president, have fueled speculation that he may declare the Iraqi government incapable of the kind of political accommodations that the crackdown on violence was supposed to permit.
Well, wouldn’t that be interesting. I’ve been working under the assumption that McCain would return singing the same song he’s been performing for years (“Iraq is progressing nicely!”). If he’s open to giving up on the Maliki government, that would certainly throw the chess-board in the air.
To be clear, I’m not counting on any of this. Even the talk about the White House getting out in front of this seems dubious — the NYT article reads a bit like a Bush insider dishing to the media in the hopes of spurring action among his colleagues.
That said, momentum is moving in the Dems’ direction — a fact that Harry Reid seems anxious to take advantage of.