You cannot blame President George W Bush for wanting a lengthy holiday. The autumn that awaits him is a grim, if predictable, one.
As I write it is unclear if a workable Iraqi constitution can be agreed upon by the continuously delayed deadline; it is unclear if success in passing such a constitution without much more Sunni support will worsen the insurgency or ameliorate it; it is unclear if new elections as an alternative would help matters; and it is unclear what exactly Washington plans to do if any of these potential scenarios pan out.
Rattled yet? Parts of the American right are.
The latest polling shows that Iraq has re-emerged as the central question on American minds and that the president’s approval ratings are hitting the low forties. The American public hears the same insistence from its president that America will prevail, but it also knows there is no safe way to drive from Baghdad airport to the green zone and the insurgency may be on the verge of another wave of violence.
The Iraqi elite’s constitutional deadlock and the running toll on American lives do not help domestic morale. One conservative blogger vented that, on the Iraq war, “people seem to be running out of energy here, and W is simply not rallying them . . . The momentum has stopped. Everything has come to a screeching halt”.
It is time, perhaps, for a reality check. At current US and Iraqi force levels, the insurgency cannot win. At the same time a peremptory pull-out of US troops, as hinted by a leading US general in the Financial Times last week, won’t happen either. Bush has three more years as commander in chief and he has invested far too much in some sort of democratic outcome in Iraq to cut and run any time soon.
Leading Democrats will be extremely careful not to appear to be undercutting the troops in the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections. Brinkmanship now is better than civil war later. And the brinkmanship is in part made possible by the relative stability of the underlying source of power: US arms.
The delicate task of slowly winning by slowly withdrawing is not something easily planned or foreseen. But it is still possible — even likely — if we take the time and have the patience to make it work.
Moreover, the Kurds and the Shi’ites want essentially the same things and they constitute almost 80% of the population. They agree on one man one vote in a free party system and on a unitary state with major devolution to the Shi’ite south and the Kurdish north. They are also slowly coming to some kind of compromise on the role of Islam in the constitution and the distribution of oil resources.
Yes, the Sunnis are the rub, but they always have been and were always going to be. Deposing Saddam Hussein always meant an end to minority tyranny. Finding a way to a more democratic future was always going to prompt some level of Sunni resistance.
These things are not surprising (although the ferocity of the Sunni insurgency clearly surprised almost everyone outside the country). What is surprising is that some people are shocked that after a mere two years we haven’t stumbled across the promised land yet.
Washington, moreover, is not going to complain if something different from western-style democracy begins to emerge in Baghdad and beyond. Nobody wants to see women’s rights go backwards, but a greater role for Islam in public life is inevitable. As long as an unelected theocracy doesn’t emerge, the US will be relatively happy to declare victory and leave.
That may take more time than many now expect. It will certainly take a more persuasive rhetorical strategy from the Bush team to bring the American people along. But it is not unreasonable to believe that such an outcome is possible within the next couple of years — even more likely than full-scale civil war.
As for troop withdrawal, there is a distinction between cutting your losses and delegating military power to local troops. It is not a change of strategy to want the Iraqi military to take over responsibility for security. That was always the strategy.
The Financial Times’s source, Major General Douglas Lute, director of operations at US central command, said: “We believe at some point, in order to break this dependence on the . . . coalition, you simply have to back off and let the Iraqis step forward.”
Note three words slightly glossed over by the Financial Times: “at some point”. What that point is remains to be seen. And unless civil war engulfs the country (which would require an unlikely combination of simultaneous Shi’ite and Kurdish revolt), it is likely to occur at some point under Bush.
Should he panic? By no means. His weakness of rhetoric is matched by a doggedness of intent. Politically he can insist with Churchillian resolve that he will never relent, use the next few months to accuse the Democrats of defeatism and weakness and then slowly withdraw troops as events allow.
Sure, any withdrawal of troops in the next year will be derided by some as failure, just as it will be hailed by others as success. But politically, Bush’s base so wants both to win and to withdraw that it will be prepared to believe his spin over, say, Hillary Clinton’s. So will many Americans in the middle of the political spectrum. Remember who won elections at the height of Vietnam panic? Richard M Nixon.
In reality, of course, what matters is what will remain on the ground in Mesopotamia in the next few years. Will what emerges be preferable to a sanctions-wrecked Iraq still run by Saddam or on the brink of being handed over to his psychopathic sons? Will it be more democratic than any other Muslim country in the Middle East?
As long as the answer to both those questions is a plausible yes, the Bush administration will be able to claim success of a sort. Not the democratic revolution some of us once hoped for. But not quite the nightmare so constantly predicted by others, either.
Those of us who have long backed this war, despite its manifold errors, may well be chastened. But we haven’t given up yet.
