It looks like the White House has settled on its new p.r. strategy. The Bush gang is going to boast that their tactics in Iraq have been so successful, the president has graciously decided to end the surge.
White House aides said they are working on a 20-minute prime-time speech that Bush will give tomorrow night, in which he will endorse the main elements of the strategy outlined by Petraeus and Crocker on Capitol Hill this week.
They said the president plans to emphasize that he is in a position to order troop cuts only because of the success achieved on the ground in Iraq, and that he is not being swayed by political opposition. Aides said that he plans to outline once again what he sees as the dire consequences of failure in Iraq and that he will make the troop cuts conditional on continued military gains.
Got that? The “surge” worked, the argument goes, so now Bush is confident enough to return troop levels to pre-surge levels. It’s a tortured spin: “Look how successful we are!”
The WaPo ran a 1,400-word, front-page piece on this without acknowledging that the so-called surge has to end anyway. Bush’s spin is transparently deceptive — he’s not ending the surge because it worked; he’s ending the surge because running out of troops doesn’t leave him with any choice.
And yet, the headlines this morning make it look like the president is delivering good news. USAT’s headline, for example, reads, “Bush to support troop pullback.” The AP’s headline tells readers, “Bush to announce troop cut.” The implication of the media coverage today is that the president has a choice, and he decided to bring some troops home next summer. But what the public needs to realize is that Bush doesn’t have a choice. These troops were coming back next summer whether the president liked it or not. The p.r. move is shameless and hollow.
In fact, it’s worse than that. Bush, by making a fuss out of a decision he had no choice but to make, is also effectively conceding that his policy won’t change at all between now and next summer. The White House wants failure to be rewarded with more time, more blood, and more treasure.
Congress’ response will be far more interesting.
Politically, it might be tempting for Dems to play a cynical game here. With Bush effectively announcing the end of the surge by next summer, Dem leaders can say, “We demanded that the president start to bring men and women in uniform home from Iraq, and he’s listening. We opposed the surge and thanks to our pressure, the surge is now poised to end.”
It would be ridiculous b.s., of course, but with Dems unable to get the GOP support they want for a withdrawal timetable, I imagine the leadership at least considered the spin anyway.
To their credit, they’re playing it straight.
Plans by President Bush to announce a withdrawal of up to 30,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer drew sharp criticism yesterday from Democratic leaders and a handful of Republicans in Congress, who vowed to try again to force Bush to accept a more dramatic change of policy.
A second day of testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker yielded some of the most biting GOP objections since the president announced his troop buildup in January. Several Republicans joined Democrats in saying that Petraeus’s proposal to draw down troops through the middle of next summer would result only in force levels equivalent to where they stood before the increase began, about 130,000 troops.
After meeting with Bush yesterday at the White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) expressed similar dismay with the Petraeus plan. The general has refused to commit to further reductions until he can assess conditions on the ground next March.
Pelosi said she told Bush that he was essentially endorsing a 10-year “open-ended commitment.” Reid said the president wants “no change in mission — this is more of the same.”
Good answer.