Peggy Noonan continues to come unglued in public. You can read the whole thing if you like carwrecks, but the most interesting part is where she states the position of the Washington Republican elite.
What a dreadful mistake the president made when he stiff-armed the Iraq Study Group report, which had bipartisan membership, an air of mutual party investment, the imprimatur of what remains of or is understood as the American establishment, and was inherently moderate in its proposals: move diplomatically, adjust the way we pursue the mission, realize abrupt withdrawal would yield chaos. There were enough good ideas, anodyne suggestions and blurry recommendations (blurriness is not always bad in foreign affairs–confusion can buy time!) that I thought the administration would see it as a life raft. Instead they pushed it away.
Before long Noonan will be wondering aloud whether Bush and Cheney belong in the Hague. But she is not there yet. For now she is only contemplating something she dare not make explicit: the collapse of the administration and their replacement by [egad] Democrats.
But there are two vacuums in the Iraq story. The first is the vacuum that would be filled in Iraq if America withdrew tomorrow. The second is the power vacuum that will be created in Washington if the administration is, indeed, collapsing. The Democrats of Capitol Hill will fill that one. And they seem–and seemed in their statements after the president’s speech–wholly unprepared to fill it, wholly unserious in their thoughts and approach. They seem locked into habits that no longer pertain, and absorbed by the small picture of partisan advancement at the expense of the big picture, which is that the nation is in trouble and needs their help. They are sunk in the superficial.
I know what Noonan is saying. I don’t agree with her. But too many Democrats have not realized that Elite Washington Republicans consider the Bush/Cheney administration as beyond help. Just push a little and the edifice will topple. The votes will be there.
