Juan Cole made a somewhat contrarian argument this AM that asks the provocative question: Can Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker Save the Next Democratic President?
Professor Cole's thinking seems to go as follows:
- The next president will be a Democrat
- That next president will start to end the occupation of Iraq in the summer of '09
- As things look now it is likely that when we leave several civil wars will break out (Shia vs. Shia in the Basra area, Shia vs. Sunni in Baghdad area, and Sunni Arabs vs. Kurds and Turkmen in Kirkuk area). This will be ugly an likely bring in other regional powers and could well cause a spike in oil prices.
The danger Professor Cole sees in this is that the next president will have happen to him/her the same thing that happened to President Ford when we finally totally lost the war in Viet Nam. Or what happened to President Carter when oil prices spiked and put the economy into "stagflation".
Given this view Professor Cole comes to the conclusion that even though it is a long shot, and one which it is probably not worth taking, given the fact that there is no way that Congress will be able to force a withdrawal before '09 we had all better hope that Petraeus and Crocker will get lucky and/or that Iraqi leaders see the light and come to some sort agreement to prevent chaos when we leave in '09.
As to the idea that the Democrats will be blamed for the likely disaster in Iraq, Professor Cole sees this as very "unfair" but reminds us that "life is unfair" and so that therefore:
. . . the best hope for the Dems may be that Gen. Petraeus actually succeeds, over the next year, in significantly reducing ethnic tensions. It is a slim reed to hold onto, as they recognize.
But from the moment Bush went into Iraq, Americans were screwed. And that includes the Democratic Party, which is being set up to take the fall.
I'm a severe skeptic on the likelihood of anything that looks like success in Iraq. But I don't think career public servants such as Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus are acting as partisan Republicans in their Iraq efforts. I think they both are sincere, experienced men attempting to retrieve what they can for America from Bush's catastrophe. They may as well try, since the Democrats can't over-rule Bush and get the troops out, anyway. If the troops are there, they may as well at least be deployed intelligently, which is what Gen. Petraeus is doing. I wish them well in their Herculean labors. Because if they fail, I have a sinking feeling that we are all going down with them, including the next Democratic president. And their success is a long shot.
I suppose that the real question is whether Americans have such a short attention span that they will really blame Democrats for the likely bad outcome in Iraq post-occupation. Of course the GOP dead enders will never stop saying that we were about to win in Iraq until those cowardly Democrats ended the occupation, but the question will be will regular Americans really blame a Democratic president who is handed Bush's war for not being able to somehow win it.
I hope that Americans are smarter and have longer memories than Professor Cole fears but I do think that those fears are realistic.