The Washington War Game

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek

Early rumblings of an anti-war movement sounded in Washington this week as several progressive groups joined forces to press the Democratic Congress to use its power of the purse to stop the latest escalation of the conflict in Iraq. Unlike their predecessors in the Vietnam era, who were often scruffy and unshaven, these activists are well within the mainstream in their appearance as well as their politics.

Polite but persistent, they include labor activist Andy Stern, a savvy organizer, Roger Hickey with Campaign for America’s Future, who normally advocates for health care, and Jon Soltz of Vote Vets, an organization that helped elect Iraq vets to Congress. Soltz said Bush’s plan of sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq is “kind of like spitting in the ocean,” and the president is “too much of a coward to admit a mistake.” MoveOn.org added 65,000 new members in the last 48 hours, executive director Eli Pariser reported. The liberal group is funding bus signs to declare in bold black letters, ENOUGH.

The net roots are pushing hard on Democrats to go beyond symbolic resolutions to oppose the war. But Democrats were so thoroughly chastised and blamed for losing Vietnam that they’re wary of getting tagged as the party who undermined the troops. In ’72, the country overwhelmingly re-elected President Nixon even after four years of his secret plan to end the war. By the time Congress voted to withhold funds for the war, Jerry Ford was president and American troops had left the battlefield. Without its benefactor, the puppet South Vietnamese government promptly fell, and U.S. personnel fled onto helicopters from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon. The Democrats got tarred with the loss, along with a lasting reputation for being weak on national security.

The freight train is moving faster this time. The Democrats know they’re on borrowed time. They wouldn’t be in the majority if it weren’t for their opposition to the war. Senator Kennedy introduced legislation to prevent Bush from escalating the conflict without congressional approval, but few of his colleagues are with him. Even Illinois Sen. Barak Obama, who sharply criticized Bush’s “surge,” is not ready to jump on the Kennedy bandwagon. Sen. Hillary Clinton, another likely ’08 contender, conspicuously did not endorse Kennedy’s bill. Democrats are moving toward a non-binding resolution opposing the build-up that could attract the support of a dozen Republicans, in addition to every Democrat with the exception of Senator Lieberman, who was re-elected last fall as an independent but caucuses with his old party. Lieberman backs the surge.

This fight is no longer about Democrats versus the White House. It’s now a confrontation between the two branches of government on a scale not seen since Vietnam. On the House side, Speaker Pelosi is sounding more aggressive, rallying Democrats in a closed caucus meeting with Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” She is scheduling a vote on the Bush escalation either next week or shortly after the president’s State of the Union address on Jan. 23. An aide said she is looking to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, who led the Democratic opposition to the war, and Rep. Ike Skelton, the traditionally hawkish chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to come up with ways to tie Bush’s hands short of withholding money from troops in the field.

If you count Bush’s initial crowing on the deck of an aircraft carrier that major combat operations were over, this is Bush’s fifth rollout of a plan for victory. And it’s much bleaker than the others, says Matt Bennett of Third Way, a Democratic centrist group. To have any hope of success, the plan hinges on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki breaking with his protector, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is more effective than the Iraqi army. “Pressuring Maliki to go after the Mahdi militia is like depending on the Bush administration to break the NRA,” says Bennett. The likelihood of Maliki stepping up to the task is so remote that some lawmakers see the Bush surge as a kind of secret exit plan. In their view, Bush knows he’s got a bad deal, and Maliki will never purge the Mahdi army; when the Iraqi prime minister fails to deliver, Bush can blame the Iraqis for being weak and feckless and corrupt, and begin to withdraw U.S. troops. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski dubs this scenario “blame and run.”

But Bush could have blamed the Iraqis without sending in more troops. Which leads to the other scenario bruited about in Washington, principally among Democrats: that Bush is using American troops as political pawns. There is a widespread view that the war is lost, and Bush is postponing the inevitable until after he leaves office—or worse, preparing to widen the war to Iran and Syria rather than accept defeat.

What we have is a crisis of confidence in two governments, Baghdad and Washington. A Democratic congressional aide coming away from a meeting at the White House said it was “almost sad” to watch the president “making this pitch and practicing his phraseology,” when the only thing that will change people’s minds are results on the ground. After four years, there’s little hope anything will be different.