The Times' Trifecta on Iraq

This past Sunday's New York Times op ed pages offered a brilliant triad of analyses of where the US Iraqi policy is in the wake of congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

First, Frank Rich in a tough-minded column, "Will the Democrats Betray Us?," got to the heart of the matter:

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.... General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not.

Rich then turned to President George W. Bush's repackaging of the limited 2008 troop withdrawals:

The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Finally, Rich, understanding that there is NOTHING more that can be expected from the Bush administration, challenges the 2008 contenders to offer more and to offer specifics:

New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.... Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality.

Paul Krugman in "A Surge, and Then a Stab," focuses on Iraq's economic bloodline to diagnosis the surge's failure:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed... Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources. Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed. What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.... Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Having failed, Krugman writes, Bush has only one option -- to write that failure into the next president's history, not his own:

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

And finally, Thomas L. Friedman, the pundit who of these three has been most credulous about what Bush has attempted in Iraq, in "Somebody Else's Mess," offers the most damning assessment, echoing Rich's view, but going further:

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

Friedman is clearly prepared to go long on Democratic stock, but also issues a warning to them:

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

And Friedman too argues that the Democrats will have to have a proactive stance on national security, not one based solely on being the un-Bush:

Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

That argument is much the same as a warning Rich issues regarding the obsessively cautious signals coming from the Democratic presidential camps not only in their criticisms of Bush, but also in their unwillingness to take on those allies on the left -- specifically MoveOn.org -- who are muddying up the debate and throwing fuel on the fire of political divisiveness (though probably gathering a fair amount of cash in the process) rather than contributing to a national dialogue of clarity and purpose:

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

Read these three pieces.