Chimpy and Darth or Going To Destroy the GOP

The bad news is, they are going to do the same thing to this country.

Whether you call it admirable resolve or blind stubbornness, George W. Bush’s refusal to compromise has once again kept management of the Iraq War firmly in his own hands.

Last week, the Democratic Congress blinked with both eyes and gave the president the money he wants to prosecute the conflict through the summer — without any meaningful strings. Lacking veto-proof majorities at both ends of the Capitol, as well as the political fortitude required to risk getting tagged as “failing to support the troops,” the new majority leadership stripped the exit timetables out of the midyear war spending measure and gave Bush the “clean bill” he’d demanded from the outset.

Indeed, Bush may have just executed one of the more remarkable feats of high-stakes brinkmanship in presidential history, a case of sheer will overcoming political forces. Even Abraham Lincoln had to show tangible success on the battlefield — namely, the burning of Atlanta in 1864 — to sidetrack mounting opposition to the Civil War and avoid what might have been an electoral disaster for himself and his party that year.

Faced with nothing but bad news from Iraq, coupled with the enduring and widespread fear that his strategies are showing little or no hope of producing a turnaround on the battlefield or in public opinion, an unpopular president has been able to secure unfettered financing to maintain an unpopular war with no end in sight. How has Bush done this?

For starters, he’s taken the advice of Aaron Burr a major step further. More than two centuries ago, before he was Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, Burr famously offered this guidance to young attorneys: “Law is that which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.”

Bold assertion has been the hallmark of Bush’s rhetoric on the war. But he’s prevailed without heeding Burr’s admonition that one’s assertions must be “plausibly maintained.” From pre-war claims about an Iraqi nuclear threat and continuing insistence on ties between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, to his warnings last week of Iraq being used as a base for more violence around the world, there is little that is overtly plausible about the president’s descriptions surrounding the war.

At best, Bush was telling a half-truth last week when he announced that newly declassified information proved that Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda mastermind of Sept. 11, told counterparts in Iraq to prepare more attacks against the United States and other countries. It could only be called new information because it had been conveniently declassified only a day before the president made his assertion, in a graduation speech at the Coast Guard Academy. But it was based on two-year-old intelligence about bin Laden’s communications to an Iraqi ally who died a year ago.

Bush seems to believe that if he says it, then it must be true — and anyone who says otherwise is not supporting the troops. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who has become an influential icon among anti-war viewers, compared Bush on his show last week to a child who “holds his breath, and threatens to continue to do so, until he turns blue.” But however petulant it might seem, the president’s approach is working. Democratic congressional leaders backed down precisely because they feared Bush’s threats to accuse them of abandoning the troops.


Democrats on the Run

It’s too bad the president cannot whip the Iraq insurgents as well as he takes on the Democratic Congress. But looking at the Capitol Hill arithmetic, you have to wonder how Democrats ever thought they could force exit timetables on the White House. Despite the conventional wisdom that last year’s election proved that most Americans want out of Iraq, the voters simply did not send enough anti-war lawmakers to Washington to overcome presidential vetoes.

Holding Republicans in line has been the key to Bush’s success against Democratic aims to wrest control of the war away from him.

Despite GOP grumbling, which included a high-profile delegation of party moderates going to the White House to urge retreat, the lack of defections in roll call votes on Capitol Hill made it impossible for Democrats to win the day. Until Republicans start casting votes that sync with their public and private complaints about the president’s war policy, he will continue to get his way.

Democrats are now counting on drawing another line in the sand come September, when the new round of funding debates will climax and the full measure of the Bush “surge” can be taken. They are hoping that, if the increased troop levels and new combat tactics haven’t produced results by then, Republican solidarity will collapse.

Even in the best-case scenarios for Democrats, however, they could still fall short of the veto-proof majority they will need to take control of this war. The more likely possibility is that only the 2008 election can change things. And by then, Bush will have kept his war going all the way to his last day in office.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. His new book is “The Politics of Life: 25 Rules for Survival in a Brutal and Manipulative World.” He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.

© 2006 Congressional Quarterly

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....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free