Listening to the radio today in the car, it was astonishing to hear serious debate about a "troop surge." My ears immediately perked up. To me "troop surge" -- a phrase meant to suggest that an additional token force in Iraq might represent some kind of momentum change -- suggests Rovian marketeering (you know, the people who brought us "weapons of mass destruction" to conflate nukes and mustard gas, and "the Patriot Act" to conflate patriotism and creation of police-state apparatus).
The "Troop surge" branding indicates that the idea is very likely coming from the marketing guys, er, political guys at the White House. Add in consideration that, as policy, its an idea that falls between empty and idiotic, and you can bet that this whole debate is mainly about product positioning (i.e., Republican campaigns in 2008).
(Further argument below)
Let’s recap what we know:
Rumsfeld has already been served up as a fall guy.
Republicans have field tested several leading marketing ideas for deflecting blame for the Iraq disaster. The catastrophic failure is either the fault of:
- The media
- The American people
- The Iraqi people
- Iran and Syria
- US troops
- US generals
Surprisingly, I do not believe they have fully tested blaming the international community and other countries – though the whole John Bolton circus was partly about blaming the United Nations.
The White House, of course, is like a collapsing neutron star in the middle of the picture, attracting legitimate blame with almost inexorable force. (Perhaps they are hoping they can, metaphorically, hide behind the event horizon of the resulting black-hole. Think this metaphor is a stretch? Wait until the subpoenas start to fly in January.)
So, because the blame cannot be deflected from the administration, they have thrown Rumsfeld under the bus. (Hopefully there was no tire damage.)
The President’s sold-out listening tour (they recently added 6 new dates!) is the last act of this ritual sacrifice, suggesting that our noble leader wasn’t, you know, getting the straight story up to now under the Rumsfeld regime. Get it? "The decider" protestations to the contrary, Bush is really blameless for past blunders – and is ready to step up now, tie on his bandana, and personally start kicking ass and taking names.
Also consider that Bush is taking advice from Henry Kissinger.
Bush often reiterates the theme that Iraq is not Vietnam. It surely is not – it is a significantly more enormous quagmire.
But Bush war management is somewhat Nixonian. As part of the Nixon effort to extricate the US from Vietnam, the US dramatically ratcheted up bombing (and harbor-mining, and napalming etc.) on many occasions during the drawdown of US troops, presumably to give Kissinger leverage in the Paris Peace talks, but also to underscore Republican "toughness" leading up to the 1972 election, to create firm contrast to Democrats, who wanted to end the war. (Nixon's victory in 1972 was the biggest landslide in history up to that time.)
Boosting the "troop surge" is meant to try to do something similar – to nominally bolster ongoing diplomatic initiatives (we can be sure that the insurgents are quaking in their boots at the prospect of increasing US troop-strength – currently at about 25% of what would have been needed when there was still a chance for stability – by a whopping 10%) -- but mainly to make the Democrats look like wimps in comparison, bolstering the intended storyline: Bush was hamstrung by the resistance of the Democrats.
Another way to look at the troop surge is as inoculation from the "cut and run" charge they've been hurling at others for the last year. Once the withdrawal is complete, and new rounds of blame are circulating vis the very likely resultant international crisis, they want voters to ask "Bush (and McCain, et al)? -- they wanted to increase troops didn't they? They must have known what would happen."
Bush and Rove are just itching for Democrats to try and block the "troop surge" idea, and must be losing their minds at the Joint Chiefs stepping up, instead, and calling them out.
[As a side note, on the Vietnam parallel, it must be terribly frustrating to Bush that there are no really good targets in Iraq on which he might drop hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs. (Nixon was able to really cut lose in the early 1970s). Bush’s hands are tied because large-scale bombing would kind of go against the reconstruction objective and the "peace and prosperity are blossoming" talking points. And even his substitute mode of release – high-altitude carpet-bombing of Republican-crony contractors with billions in taxpayer dollars – is now threatened, though we’ll see how seriously.]
Of course the other major tack of Nixonian escape was to broach diplomatic detentes with China and Russia (i.e., turn up the cold war framing at home and cut some deals abroad that would make Hanoi feel less secure).
So what do you think – will our grand-children spout a classic aphorism along the lines of "You know, only Bush could go to Tehran?"
Ok, ok – its clear that Bush gets kind of hazy on geography north of Riyadh. But wouldn’t it be something to see Bush and Ahmedinejad together at a summit? You could add in Johny Knoxville and double the IQ in the room. But I digress.
The modern Republican machine is much more about patronage and politics than principles and policy.
All that really matters to Rove’s shop is getting the gravy-train back on track. They've got a narrow window to try to hold the core of their patronage machine together.
The truism that "history is written by the winners" is outdated – if it ever was true. History nowadays can effectively be written, or re-written by the well-funded (consider how the right repositioned the New Deal over the last 40 years), and even revisionist accounts are subject to what is not buried (or shredded) by the people in power. Bush and Rove’s best chance to rescue modern Republicanism and Bush’s legacy is to help Republicans recapture the Congress and hold on to the White House.
They know that, despite Bush’s record-low approval ratings, most Americans still could not find Iraq on a map. And they know that one of their key messages to this majority constituency is "us strong – them (Democrats) weak." So troop surge.
Democrats have recognized the outlines of the game and, ominously, Democratic leadership is taking the same tack they have been taking for 5 years – stay quiet, don’t raise a fuss, and hope things work out. Hey – this strategy worked in the election, didn’t it?
And it seems to be working now – the Joint Chiefs are taking the lead in objecting to idiotically sacrificing more soldiers and further undermining our security and the military as an institution – not to mention spinning our wheels at best, and exacerbating a bad situation at worst.
Hey, great. Maybe Democrats do not need to develop a credible voice on national security that might actually help lead us out of the mess created by Bush's world historic blunder. Maybe Democrats will be able to spend the next few years in the comfort of their easy chairs rotating from watching-triumph-to-watching-triumph. The strategy seems to be working so far -- and actually standing up to Bush might be risky -- Republicans seem to have better spin guys than us...
The fundamental truth that the "troop surge" debate demonstrates – and I defy anyone to point out a comparably idiotic, dysfunctional debate under comparable circumstances anywhere in history – is that the November election was only a very small step toward fixing our problems (the grown-ups are clearly not back in charge), and that the path, if we survive it, will be very long.