Saturday, June 02, 2007

A difficult war for Democrats

A difficult war for Democrats
By Christopher Caldwell
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: June 1 2007 19:37 | Last updated: June 1 2007 19:37


Two seemingly contradictory things are happening in the US. At the very moment when anti-war sentiment has triumphed, the anti-war movement appears to have stalled. Those who call the Iraq war an epochal catastrophe have won the battle for public opinion – decisively and irreversibly. A New York Times poll in late July showed that 76 per cent of Americans thought the war was going badly or very badly, and 61 per cent rued the decision to invade.

You would never guess this by looking at the mood of American politics. A month ago, George W. Bush vetoed a supplemental defence spending bill that contained a deadline for removing troops from Iraq. Democrats were sharply divided on whether they should offer the president a new bill with the deadline taken out or stake everything on ending the war through an apocalyptic budget confrontation. They chose the former route. In late May, the new deadline-less version passed 280-142 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate, with mostly Republican votes.

To the Democrats’ committed militants, it appeared that the new majority, elected in a spirit of disgust over Iraq, was voting for the programme of the discredited minority. A few days after the vote, Cindy Sheehan, an impassioned and erratic war protester whose son was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, announced in a letter to a partisan website that she was abandoning the anti-war movement. Letter writers to The New York Times have professed themselves “dismayed, disappointed and frustrated”, “disgusted” and “utterly baffled” by Democratic wishy-washiness. MoveOn.org, the partisan activist group, said it might support challenges to Democrats who voted for the bill. John Edwards, the populist presidential candidate, said: “Bush will not listen. Congress will not fight. There’s no one left to lead the country now but we the people.”

Such responses are unreasonable and unrealistic. Democrats are now steering the war towards its close. The inclination of Republicans is to follow them and they have hinted they will do so once General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, testifies before Congress in September. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said last week: “I think that the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall and I expect the president to lead it.”

The problem for Democrats is that, in a democracy, ending a war that one’s country is losing is a delicate matter. The anti-war position can be the correct – and even the patriotic – one, but it presents a number of traps. Expressing a legislative sense against the war emboldens the enemy and weakens troops in the field. Any anti-war coalition will have a hard time striking before the iron is very, very hot.

As the US public sees it, setting a date to bring America’s fighting men back to their lawn-mowers and bowling alleys and television sets is all right. Depriving them of the means to defend themselves on the battlefield is not. That is why the Democrats’ position is complicated by their past opposition. In the early days of the Iraq fighting, anti-war Democrats honed oratorical points that, they hoped, would turn the American public against the war. One of the most effective concerned “body armour”. America’s brave soldiers, Democrats said, were endangered because they were under-equipped. Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, was forcing them to fight on the cheap.

Battles over funding can bring nasty surprises to politicians who think they have the will of the people behind them. In 1995, broad support for Newt Gingrich’s new Republican majority evaporated when a stalemate with beleaguered Bill Clinton threatened to shut down the federal government. Today, fairly or not, it is congressional Democrats who will be blamed in the event of a funding cut-off in Iraq. According to the poll in The New York Times, only 13 per cent of Americans want to stop funding for the war outright. But 69 per cent favour setting benchmarks – the approach followed in the bill that Democrats passed and Mr Bush signed.

Hardline Democrats have accused their representatives of cynicism and questioned whether they are as opposed to the war as they profess. A majority of Democrats in the Senate, after all, voted to grant Mr Bush authority to use force against Saddam Hussein in late 2002. The circle of foreign-policy intellectuals around Mr Clinton were instrumental in rallying the American public to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A pair of new books published this week recount Hillary Clinton’s equivocation on the Iraq issue.

There is, however, a solid piece of evidence that Democrats’ vote on the Iraq bill was a principled one. It is that they linked it to an increase in the minimum wage – a centrepiece of their domestic platform. This made it possible to get Mr Bush’s signature, but it also deprived the Democrats of a campaign issue for 2008, since the wage rise passed with mostly Republican votes. If Democrats are not milking the minimum wage for partisan gain, they are unlikely to play politics with Iraq.

For now, Democrats have got all they can out of the Iraq issue. That the American public is sick of Mr Bush and tired of Iraq does not mean that it yet trusts Democrats in power. Activists in all walks of political life often have the mistaken impression that without their hectoring, no consensus would ever form. But today, the best case against the war is being made by the war itself. The anti-war cause has broadened to include many who supported the war early on. Hardline partisans who embraced protest reflexively in the run-up to the war half a decade ago are still the most vocal part of the anti-war movement. They are no longer the most representative.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

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