Bush Political Strategy

Peter Beinart is editor-at-large at The New Republic and the author of "The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again" (HarperCollins).

In an article published 7-10-06, Beinart explains how President Bush has chosen partisan and divisive policies whenever he had a chance to unite the American public. That strategy has always been to win elections with 50.1% of the vote so that no compromise with a larger majority would be necessary. As an election strategy it has succeeded for five years, but at a terrible cost to the country and is now bearing bitter results. Not only are we increasingly helpless in bringing the world community behind our ideas, we have a populace consisting of half the people who will not accept any idea emanating from the administration and another half who are unable to question anything the administration says.

Why doesn't George W. Bush want to win in Iraq? Seriously. The past several weeks have forced him to choose between two big goals: demonizing Democrats to help the GOP retain control of Congress and fostering a domestic climate that gives the new Iraqi government the best chance to survive. And, again and again, he has chosen door number one. This is what ex-Bush officials like Paul O'Neill and John DiIulio warned us about--and what Hurricane Katrina reaffirmed: that what matters in this administration is not policy, but politics. For all his talk about America's historical mission to defeat tyranny and spread freedom, there is only one mission to which George W. Bush has shown consistent devotion: winning elections. He acts less like the president than like the head of the Republican National Committee.

The situation in Iraq today is desperate but not hopeless. And, in the months to come, avoiding the abyss will require brutal compromises, not only in Baghdad, but in Washington--the kind that require support on both sides of the aisle. The good news is that the basic outlines of a deal to undermine the insurgency, break up the militias, and facilitate U.S. withdrawal are becoming clear. Sunni nationalist (as opposed to jihadist) insurgents seem increasingly willing to lay down their arms--if they are granted amnesty, the constitution is rewritten to accommodate their concerns, and U.S. troops leave. And, if Sunni insurgents stop massacring the Shia, then Shia militias may begin to disband.
That's the good news. The bad news is that envisioning the outlines of a final deal is a lot easier than achieving one. Ending the Iraq war will require agonizing concessions, not only from Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds--but from Americans as well. For starters, the United States will have to resist imposing a timetable for withdrawal, even though many Americans want one and many Democratic activists are demanding one. Such a plan must come from the Iraqi government, as part of a broader agreement with the Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. If the Iraqi government tells us to leave, it strengthens them--especially among the Sunnis who want us gone the most. But if we tell them we are leaving, it looks like a vote of no confidence in their ability to survive--which might embolden the Sunni insurgents to think they can win on the battlefield and, in turn, make the Shia militias dig in their heels.

For Americans, however, resisting a public withdrawal date is only the beginning. The truly gut-wrenching part will be looking the other way if Iraq's government allows insurgents who murdered heroic young Americans to go free. In blood-soaked societies, some kind of amnesty is crucial. Amnesties helped overcome the Islamist insurgency that ravaged Algeria in the 1990s, and they helped peacefully transfer power in South Africa, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Like black South Africans who saw their families slaughtered under apartheid, some Iraqi Shia and Kurds who saw their families slaughtered by Saddam Hussein will have to accept a public acknowledgement of the truth but no full justice. And some grieving American families will have to as well. The United States can get Iraqi leaders to fudge this on paper. But, on the ground, an amnesty for some violent anti-U.S. insurgents may prove crucial to persuading Sunni nationalists to break with the foreign jihadists, lay down their arms, and give Iraq's new government a chance at life.

Swallowing these concessions will require a bipartisan bargain--the kind of ceasefire required for difficult domestic changes like reforming Social Security or the tax code. Were he interested in such a deal, Bush would have invited top Democrats into his office after the formation of Iraq's new government and the death of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and said something like this. "If you resist a withdrawal plan so the Iraqis can announce their own, I'll bring you in on the negotiations. In fact, I'll replace Donald Rumsfeld with a secretary of defense that you trust--why don't you suggest a few names. And, if you don't demagogue this amnesty stuff, I'll tell Karl Rove and his henchmen to stop calling you cowardly defeatists. That might hurt me this November, since slandering Democrats is my best chance of luring Republicans to the polls. But I'm more interested in winning Iraq than winning Ohio. And, to do that, I need your help."

Of course, over the past several weeks, President Bush has done exactly the opposite. Rove and company immediately wielded Zarqawi's death as a partisan club, saying that, if Democrats had their way, he'd still be loose. Then the White House and congressional Republicans rigged a phony, vicious Iraq debate in Congress, which saw Republicans call the main Democratic Senate plan (which didn't include a strict withdrawal timetable) "cut and jog"--only to announce days later that the Bush administration was considering something similar itself. All of which made Democrats trying to decide what was best for the country--as opposed to merely their party--look like chumps. Partisan acrimony, already stratospheric before the Iraq debate, is now even worse. And, among Democrats, the likely result will be greater demands for a public timetable for withdrawal and louder denunciations of amnesty for insurgents. (In Tennessee, Democratic Senate hopeful Harold Ford is already running ads on the subject.) It's hard to serve the national interest when the president of the United States does not.

This has been the Democrats' dilemma all along. From the beginning, Bush has preferred the war on terrorism as a wedge issue to the war on terrorism as a unifying national cause. In 2002, he staged a fight on the Department of Homeland Security, when a bipartisan compromise could easily have been had. That fall, he told Congress he needed its support to disarm Iraq peacefully--when he was already intent on war. He has refused to seek congressional authorization for government surveillance, even though Congress would have given him most of what he wanted. In short, he has done everything in his power to alienate Democrats from an anti-jihadist struggle that, without their support, he cannot win. If Michael Moore did not exist, Bush would invent him.

Politics, of course, does not--and should not--end in times of war. But mendacious, blood-sport politics should. Instead, it has emanated from the highest office in the land. And, if we lose in Iraq, it will be a major reason why.