Sunday, July 27, 2008
Opinion
For McCain, surge is a losing strategy
He's leading a loud chorus of conservatives and Republicans desperate to make the surge the defining issue...
By Jonah Goldberg
"Senator Obama didn't support the surge, wanted to pull out, said that it would fail. I supported it when it was the toughest thing to do. I believe that my record on national security and keeping this country safe is there. And the American people will examine our records, and I will win."
That's John McCain explaining why he'll win.
He's wrong.
He's leading a loud chorus of conservatives and Republicans desperate to make the surge the defining issue of the campaign.
It's understandable why so many Republicans see the surge as an ideal political battleground. Outside foreign policy, McCain's standing with the GOP base is shaky. The party doesn't have many policy wins to brag about. And Obama doesn't have much of a record to attack. Also, many hawks see the surge as vindication that they were right about the feasibility of the Iraq invasion from the beginning. It was President Bush's bungling that was wrong, they say, not the war itself.
Whatever the merits of all that, there's a problem. As political analysis, it's nonsense. Yes, McCain heroically pushed for the surge when the war was at its most unpopular point. Even more impressive, he favored a change in strategy back when the war was popular.
Within months of the invasion, McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Later, when the Iraqi civil war erupted, al-Qaida in Iraq metastasized and Iran mounted a clandestine surge of its own, McCain doubled down; he argued that we couldn't afford to lose and proposed a revised counterinsurgency strategy for victory. That was the same month that Obama introduced the "Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007."
The Catch-22 is that the more the surge succeeds, the more advantageous it is for Obama. If it were going worse, McCain's Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al-Qaida in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower.
Recall that Bill Clinton, with his dovish record and roster of "character issues," would never have been elected if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed in 1991. With the Cold War over, the successful Reagan surge made rolling the dice on Clinton tolerable. The McCain surge produces the same effect for Obama.
SP