Answers to Bush’s Iraq dilemma? I heard none

Answers to Bush’s Iraq dilemma? I heard none
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: November 9 2006 18:44 | Last updated: November 9 2006 18:44

Appropriately enough it fell to Dick Cheney to express the hubris that came before the Republicans’ nemesis in this week’s mid-term elections. It would not matter what the voters thought about Iraq, the vice-president offered on the eve of Tuesday’s poll. Whatever the outcome, the administration would press on “full steam ahead”. Mr Cheney, meanwhile, would spend election day on a duck shoot.

Donald Rumsfeld, shoved on to his sword as soon as the votes had been counted, was the first to discover things might have to be otherwise. In sacking his defence secretary, George W. Bush caught up with a small piece of reality. His post-election pledge to reach across the aisle to Democrats in the final two years of his presidency would have been risible had Mr Rumsfeld remained in his post.

This about-turn, though, was also emblematic of the dismal narrative of the past three years in Iraq. That story, too, has been one of bold rhetorical posturing constantly overtaken by the grim truth that the administration had surrendered control of events.

Reading the political runes of the elections has not been difficult. Republicans in Congress and in governors’ mansions across the country paid the price for an unpopular war that is being lost by an unpopular president. Certainly, the exit polls showed voter dissatisfaction across a range of issues, not least the exposure of corruption and sleaze among Republicans on Capitol Hill. But the binding threads in the repudiation of Republican candidates were Iraq and Mr Bush.

The return of the Democrats to power in the House of Representatives, and seemingly the Senate, has broken the political spell cast by Karl Rove, the president’s hitherto infallible political strategist. Energising the Republican base simply did not work this time. The politics of culture wars may have shored up the vote in Red state heartlands but it cost the party the vital seats of moderate Republicans across the north east. An older paradigm – that elections are generally won in the centre ground of politics – has now reasserted itself in time for the 2008 presidential contest.

Mr Rove’s other failure – though perhaps it is unfair to blame him for the shortcomings of his boss – was seen in the voters’ rejection of what for Democrats had previously been a lethal link between the war in Iraq and America’s national security. Large majorities continue to put national security at the top of their list of concerns. Many of the same people have now concluded it is not well served by Mr Bush’s promise to “stay the course” in Iraq. A Democratic victory, the president said only a few days ago, would be a victory for the terrorists. This time the voters did not believe him. Instead they blamed the chaos in Iraq, and much else, on the administration’s incompetence.

These are big political shifts – ones that will certainly condition the context for the 2008 presidential race. Democrats can scarcely claim their victory as a ringing endorsement for their policy programme. Beyond Iraq, voters may have noticed their pledge to increase the minimum wage, but the other promises that formed the party’s “Six for ‘06” platform seem to have made little impact. Perhaps all elections are lost by incumbents but this time it was especially so. Yet, it would be extraordinary if the Democrats did not draw the central lesson that the best way to capitalise on Republican failures is by standing in the centre.

If the political messages seem relatively clear, the policy implications of the election are opaque. Nowhere more so than in foreign affairs. Washington’s foreign policy community, within and beyond the administration, is steeped in a pessimism that quite quickly tips into fatalism.

Even if Mr Bush does revert to the bipartisanship he practised as governor of Texas – itself a tall order – there is little sign that the White House has a strategy for Iraq in particular or the Middle East more generally. Nor, beyond attacking the administration’s approach and calling in vague terms for a new direction, have the Democrats articulated a persuasive alternative course.

Much of the explanation for this, of course, is a growing recognition that the US has already been defeated. The question is not so much how to win but rather, whether the bitter sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is leading inevitably to full-scale civil war; and whether the deployment of US troops makes that more or less likely. The message that the voters no longer think this a war worth the sacrifice of more American lives must now be added to that already impossible calculation.

There is scenario planning aplenty – scaling back, staged withdrawal, regional engagement, partition and even, staying the course. The administration, I was told this week, has prepared for every contingency. But answers? I heard none.

The bipartisan report being prepared under the chairmanship of James Baker, former US secretary of state and confidant to the first President Bush, is thus being invested with almost mystical authority. Never mind that Mr Baker himself has already said there are no silver bullets, miracle elixirs or such like to snatch victory from defeat.

I have heard it said that Mr Baker sees his role as rescuing the Republican party from the consequences of Mr Bush’s war. That sounds to me a touch too cynical. More likely his group will propose a package of measures that combine a last effort to reconcile Sunni and Shia with an indicative timeline for American disengagement. Mr Baker, who remarked recently that the US should be ready to talk to enemies as well as to friends, seems likely to recommend that direct contacts with Iran and Syria be part of the change of course.

The Democrats can be expected to grab such a package with both hands. Their political objective for the next two years, after all, must be to show they are acting responsibly while ensuring that responsibility for the Iraq mess remains with the Republicans. Mr Bush will find it much more difficult to embrace such an about-face.

The choice of Robert Gates, another veteran of the first President Bush’s administration, to replace Mr Rumsfeld could be a welcome step in the direction of pragmatism. The big obstacle, though, remains Mr Cheney. If he wants to salvage anything from the mess that is Iraq, Mr Bush will tell the vice-president to spend the next two years improving his aim on those duck shoots.