The stimulus fight reminds me of Iraq

Fri, 01/30/2009 - 4:06pm

By Peter Feaver

President Obama has been earnestly talking the talk of bipartisanship and walked the walk all the way to an extended closed-door session with Congressional Republicans. He even invited the Republicans to a White House cocktail party, and it is not the traditional DC party season (change we can all drink to?). Of course, Republicans needed a drink or two to drown their sorrows since the ultra-partisan Democratic leadership on the Hill rammed the stimulus package through without due consideration of Republican concerns and so got zero (that's right, zero) Republican votes as a result. (Can you think of the last time one political party by itself spent $900 billion?)

The apparent disconnect between cross-party outreach and one-party outcome is an all-too-familiar story in Washington and it reminded me of our abortive efforts to rebuild bipartisan support for seeing the Iraq war through to a successful conclusion.

Throughout 2005, we saw political support for the Iraq war erode, and with the erosion of support in DC came a drop in general public support (the causal arrow went in both directions, I know, but for the purposes of this post I think it is useful to look at how political leaders can drive down public support for a venture). This was happening even though we were largely pursuing the Iraq strategy that most Democrats and other critics wanted us to pursue.  They masked this fact by falsely claiming that we had no strategy, but when you looked at the substance of what they recommended, it bore an eerie similarity to our actual Iraq policy.

The Bush White House response was to release the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq which explained the strategy, and to accompany it with a series of major speeches explaining the logic to the American people.  We also did extensive outreach to Democrats on the Hill, along with private meetings with Democratic national security experts.  We even invited back to the White House every living Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

We moved public opinion slightly, but the results did not last. Over 2006, we pursued our bipartisan "strategy for vicoty," but without the benefit of any bipartisanship or bipartisan support. On the contrary, the Democrats relentlessly campaigned against our Iraq effort in vivid partisan terms and won back control of Congress partly as a result. And over the course of course of 2006, it became increasingly clear that this Iraq strategy was failing.

The Bush response was to change the strategy dramatically -- what became known as the surge strategy. This time, the strategy was not what most Democrats wanted us to pursue, so perhaps it is not surprising that we received no bipartisan support. On the contrary, we spent 2007 defending the strategy against a vigorous effort by Congressional Democrats to hobble the surge with their "slow bleed" strategy. This time, however, the Iraq strategy turned out to be the right one, and it was dramatically vindicated by events on the ground.

So, to recap: from 2005-06, we pursued a bipartisan Iraq strategy and tried to build bipartisan support for it, and both the strategy and our bipartisan outreach failed. From 2007-08, we pursued a one-party Iraq strategy and, despite strenuous efforts, built no bipartisan support -- and yet that strategy worked in the end.

I shrink from embracing the obvious parallelism: that because the Democrats played Iraq for partisan advantage, that must be what Republicans are doing now on the stimulus package. I find Republican concerns about the stimulus plan reasonable and I see no evidence that the House bill took those concerns seriously (certainly not as seriously as we took critiques of our Iraq strategy).

And I also shrink from embracing the obvious conclusion: that results always trump bipartisanship. My colleagues used to tease me that my fruitless pursuit of bipartisan support for the Iraq project reminded them of Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. I still in my heart believe that it was the right thing to do to try to build cross-party support.

I guess the only bottom line I will draw is this: if Obama-Reid-Pelosi continue on the path they are going, they will find themselves out on a limb. They better hope that the stimulus package has the success of the surge, and not the desultory results of the "strategy for victory." Otherwise, they may find that partisan outcomes in DC lead to fragile public support for fraught policies.

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Get off the pipe

by Seth Edenbaum on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 11:59am

"the ultra-partisan Democratic leadership on the Hill rammed the stimulus package through"

Is this a joke?

The Republicans say "kiss my ass" and it's bipartisanship. They lied their asses off and with a weak-willed and whiny opposition the result was failure on a massive scale.
"Over 2006, we pursued our bipartisan "strategy for vicoty,"[sic]
That's about as close to spelling of the word as the your dreams were to the predictable outcome.

Our new technocrats pride themselves on their competence rather than their party loyalty. That's good. But of course they pretend they have no ideology at all, which is neither true nor good. There is no "reality based community."

Humanity is frailty. Still there's a difference between the partisanship and ideological commitment of children and that of adults. The Bush administration was run on the ideological commitment of children on crack. I can't tell you to grow up but I can advise you that smoking crack has long term consequences.

Shadow Government, if you're

by J Thomas on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 12:47pm

Shadow Government, if you're going to keep being a highly partisan republican, wouldn't it be better if you find a cave in idaho to retreat to for a few years?

I know you guys wanted bipartisan cover for your blunders, and you didn't always get it. But now things are bad enough that it's likely nobody can recover, and you want to blame the guys who're trying to clean up your mess?

We'd all be better off if the GOP just dissolved itself completely, and we started a new opposition party. The GOP brand has been tarnished too much.

Nice Try

by section9 on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 9:52am

Democrats had a field day in 2006 because the strategy pursued from 2004-2006 was wrongheaded and foolish. Democrats were right to run against Bush in 2006 on the war. Democrats, Obama included, will be savaged by historians for their opposition to the Surge. I suspect historians will say that Bush held his nerve when Obama lost his.

However, what the Democrats on this board fail to understand is that the thrust of Feaver's point is correct: the Democrats are pursuing a My Way or the Highway approach to the Stimulus, much like the first Bush Administration.

The dirty little secret to understanding Barack Obama is to recognize that all the Democrats have done is to have nominated and elected a much younger and much more self-righteous and left-wing version of Donald Rumsfeld. Republicans report that when he goes into the room with them, he listens, but he never attempts to really compromise on anything. He doesn't think he has to, and to be blunt, he doesn't, at least now.

A much more shrewd Democrat, like FDR, would recognize that someday he would actually need the Republicans (FDR's had a very healthy relationship with Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in WWII). However, Obama has decided to roll over them and let Pelosi and Reid get the blame for it while hiding his own "passive aggressive" form of governance.

He very much reminds me of Rumsfeld, and we will see the similarities to the Donald as time goes by, up to and including his acolytes continue references to Obama as "the smartest guy in the room" and other hagiographic nonsense. There will be a huge price to be paid for this, of course, as time goes by, but Democrats, flush with victory and exhibiting the kind of triumphalist nonsense that we see in the above post, can't see this yet.

How and ever, what REPUBLICANS don't quite yet get is that people want some sort of recuperative, New Dealish kind of action out of the government. Right now, the Stimulus Bill is a halting non-answer that would shame the memory of Roosevelt, who by this time was making ready to employ hundreds of thousands of men in work camps in projects all over the country.

Obama? He'll get around to it maybe in 18 months.

Smart Republicans, if there are any, would look at the New Deal and kill two birds with one stone, proposing a massive armaments and infrastructure program to go hand in hand with withdrawal from Iraq and the larger middle east. This would accomplish the twin goals of recapitalizing the Navy and Air Force, put tens of thousands of people to work (probably hundreds of thousands in spinnoff jobs), and also pay off the interests who are into highways and the electrical grid.

Of course, there's a reason we're called the Stupid Party, so you'll only hear people like Kudlow go on about tax cuts.

Section9, I tend to agree

by J Thomas on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 3:17pm

Section9, I tend to agree with you. It looks to me like Republicans utterly discredited themselves which put democrats into power and gave them the chance to utterly discredit themselves too.

Maybe the central problem is that neither party has any sort of grounding any more. They are amalgams of interests. Bread and circuses. Pork and wars.

Perhaps if the GOP and the Democratic party fall apart, the libertarians and the greens or somebody might have an honest competition.

I'll give you credit for creativity, Dr. Feaver...

by wolfboy on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 7:50pm

... but little else in that post.

The Bush administration pursued a bipartisan Iraq policy during 2005-07? A creative interpretation.

Rather, I believe that the war was founded on lies, seriously botched in conception and execution, was ultimately a terrible mistake, and that Bush's primary objective was to pretend that none of this was so as long as possible, and certainly through the elections of 2004 and 2006. The Strategy for Victory is best seen as part of this effort.

Bush did not change strategy in response to failure of the previous policy so much as in response to the Iraq Study Group intervention that was about to force on Bush a course reversal that would have been humiliating to him.

My recollection is that the Democrats' focus was on Iraq as a distraction from actions to address the threat realized on 9/11. I think this analysis is correct, and while I believe that we had a continuing responsibility to try to stanch the bleeding and protect the population in Iraq, I think our strategy since 2007 has been a distraction from Afghanistan and a contributor to the deterioration there.

As for the house Republicans and the stimulus bill, based on their own bill, they mostly believe that the answer is permanent tax cuts, which seems to be their answer for most everything.

billslayer

by billslayer on Mon, 02/02/2009 - 3:04pm

Well... the fact that the Bush admin pursued a strategy in Iraq that led to chaos and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, before changing course with the surge is shameful in its stupidity.
And that's not even addressing the utility of the war itself in terms of addressing long term American security and stability.
But..

The fact that the "loyal opposition" was more interested in in ensuring American Defeat rather than in forging a strategy that would bring stability and end the carnage is a testament to who they are as humans.
The fact they they declared the strategy that actually achieved those goals a failure before it was implemented shows that they are truly sick.

To recap: the bad faith of the Democrats was not justified by the stupidity of the Republicans.