[From the diaries by susanhu. Essential information. We can’t assume today’s GOP will be any less clever than Nixon was with the games he played to win elections. We must be on alert.]

For six months I’ve been getting derisive hoots for saying that Democratic hesitance over being considered “weak on defense” is stoking my personal fear that it will be Bush and the GOP who benefit in the 2006 election cycle because of a withdrawal from Iraq. Now, Jonathan Rauch at the National Journal (hidden behind a subscription firewall) notes that Every Way But Militarily, The Pullout From Iraq Has Begun. Excerpts:

Nixon recognized that without U.S. military support, the government of South Vietnam would fall to the Communist insurgency, and he believed that a fall would represent a humiliating and costly defeat. “But Nixon realized that his approval ratings would slip fast unless he made progress in bringing the boys home,” writes Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History. American officials searching for a “breaking point” in Vietnam had found one, but what had broken was not the insurgency. It was U.S. public opinion: Americans no longer believed the war was worth it.

President Bush may not know it yet — or, then again, he may — but in Iraq he is about to do a Nixon. Psychologically and politically, the withdrawal phase has already begun. Militarily, the pullback will start within weeks or, at most, months after the December 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections.

    {snip}

And so, any day now, the president’s political advisers will go to him and say something like this:

continued below:

“Mr. President, if U.S. forces are not clearly on their way out of Iraq by about June 30, we will face a bloodbath in the midterm elections, and the Republicans will lose the House or the Senate or both. On the other hand, if U.S. forces are coming home, you will have cut the legs out from under the Democrats. They will have no choice but to support your drawdown or call for an even faster one. Either way, they would be in no position to blame you for any subsequent setbacks over there. Right now, you have nothing to say on Iraq that makes sense to the public. Once the troops start coming home, it will be the other side that has nothing to say.”

Which will Bush choose? If political reality alone does not sway him, he will reflect that maintaining a massive Iraq deployment in the face of public hostility is unsustainable and ultimately counterproductive, setting up conditions for a Vietnam-style collapse and a backlash against Bush’s democracy agenda.

So by spring, if not earlier, Bush will announce that progress in Iraq allows U.S. forces to start coming home. He will say that an American drawdown is the best way to help the Iraqis stand on their own. He will argue, much as he did with his tax cuts, that whatever pace he sets is precisely the right pace, and that withdrawing any faster or slower would be the height of irresponsibility. He may also say that withdrawing is “not a formula for getting out of [the region], but one that provided the only sound basis for America’s staying in and continuing to play a responsible role.”

Those were the words of Richard Nixon, who, somewhere, is wanly smiling.

OK, maybe not. Bush (and Cheney) are stubborn men, as was on full display in the President’s “victory” speech.

But, if a reversal of policy does occur, isn’t getting out what matters? And isn’t worrying about whether a GOP-initiated withdrawal boosts the Republican party’s chances in November just a little too pragmatically calculating, or to say it shorter, amoral?

Let me answer my own question “yes” as well as mea culpa. If the hegemonists who got us into Iraq are ultimately the ones who get us out, wishing they hadn’t for reasons of electoral political advantage is, well, depraved. There is, of course, the matter of what this would mean in the longer term for America’s foreign policy, for preventive war and the “new American century.” That, however, is another discussion. Out of Iraq, a no-dawdling, phased withdrawal, say, would be a good thing, no matter who does it, even if a few Republicans salvage what would otherwise have been disasters at the polls next November.  

Let me add that the distance a certain mixed coterie of elected Democrats have put between themselves and John Murtha over the past week – which some of them and some folks in www.Land seem to see as wisely pragmatic – makes them, in my humble opinion, pukes who may actually cost the party dearly 11 months from now. Weaseliness on matters of grave import does not make for stunning talking points on the campaign trail.

I’m not trying to reprise the hoary matter of who voted how back in October 2002. I’ve made enough serious mistakes in my life to unhesitatingly give those who said “aye” to the war resolution the benefit of the doubt even though they angered me then. What I’m talking about is how they’re behaving right. this. minute.

I’m also not referring to those elected Democrats – yes, I think there are some – who truly deeply passionately believe that staying in Iraq for the long haul (although with a different approach) is the honorable thing to do, and would stick with that stance even if they knew it would cost them votes. I disagree wholeheartedly, but I understand and can respect their point of view.

What I’m talking about are those who figure that their best move for getting re-elected, the best move to keep anybody from calling them national defense “weaklings,” the best way for Democrats not to be called the “cut and run” party in the next election cycle is to avoid expressing anything close to Murtha’s position, much less Russ Feingold’s. To, instead, weave and dodge, while Iraqis and American Marines get blown up every day and hatred for the occupation worsens our long-term security and strengthens both the propaganda and battlefield experience of extremist thugs with a global agenda.

Don’t get me wrong. I want our junta overlords out of power.   I want to see as many of them indicted, impeached and imprisoned as possible. And, even though I know all-too-well the limitations of electoral politics and of a coalition party in a two-party system, I want – desperately – to see a congressional Democratic majority in 2006, a Democrat in the White House in ’08, the chance to appoint some counterweights to Scalia, Roberts and Thomas, a change in direction of just about every Administration policy over the past five years.

On the other hand, these Dems whose cagey calculations on Iraq to save their own skins make me wish that asbestos were available in stationery form so I could relate to them just how much I despise their conscienceless machinations without setting my printer alight. And to let them know that, come next November, if their hemming and hawing proves to have the opposite effect among independent voters as they now imagine it will, I’ll have less than zero sympathy for them even as I bemoan what could have been.