Tipping---But Which Way?

The “tipping point” terminology has been used significantly for the second time in a week---first in regard to the climate crisis, and Sunday in a column by Frank Rich entitled “Someone Tell the President the War is Over.”

Rich points out that recent polls show the American public disapproves of the war in Iraq and the presidency of GW Bush in almost exactly the same percentages as disapproved of the war in Vietnam and the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, shortly before Johnson announced he wouldn’t run again.

“But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor,” Rich writes:

Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press."

Like LBJ in 1968, the crucial wound is waning support (if not, as in LBJ’s case, growing opposition) within the president’s own party. For GW, it begins with his most rabid supporters:

“The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.) “

But the force that is likely to end the war, Rich says, is the Republican party regulars, particularly in Congress, as they come closer to the 2006 elections. That’s why, Rich writes, the balance towards ending the war “crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio.”

After noting that it was in a speech in Ohio that Bush began to make the case for war in Iraq based on “a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype,” exaggeration and “false premises.” But it was last week in a special election in a solid Republican district Ohio that Democrat Paul Hackett got 48% of the vote---much closer to winning than anyone predicted. Moreover, Hackett is a former Marine reservist who served in Iraq and called GW Bush a “chickenhawk” during the campaign (for the uninitiated, a chickenhawk is a war hawk who doesn’t serve in the armed forces, and certainly doesn’t advise his or her children to do so.) He made the war in Iraq a major issue in his campaign.

Republicans noticed. Rich writes that congressional Republicans will perform the coup de grace on the war if they want to get reelected---and that’s a done deal, because the war isn’t going to go any better. Rich concludes:

“Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.”

Rich’s arguments are pervasive and persuasive, and supported by other numbers he doesn’t cite. Another poll shows that almost exactly the same percentage of Americans believe the U.S. is winning the war on terror---a paltry 38%---as support the war in Iraq. This suggests that Bush has reached to the floor of his most ardent supporters---somewhere around a third of the electorate. And if feuding rabid righters are any indication, even that floor may collapse.

But there are possible problems with Rich’s analysis. His analogy with Lyndon Johnson, apart from it being at two different points in the election cycle, fails to account for the differences in the two men. Though he doggedly pursued it and tried to punish any perceived disloyalty to his leadership, Johnson was conflicted, bedeviled, even fatalistic about the Vietnam war. GW Bush appears to be a true believer. Johnson was a man of reason much of the time, who seemed to care deeply about civil rights and wanted to create a Great Society. He was also a consummate politician. GW Bush is a zealot, with no inclination towards compromise for the good of the country, or even the good of his party. He has shown no inclination to separate himself from the neocon ideologues led by Dick Cheney.

So while US generals talk about troop reductions, Bush talks about America not losing its nerve in Iraq, and refuses to compromise on anything. Plus, this week he specifically said that the US considers the use of force an option in the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
So we may be at a tipping point, but which way is this ship of state going to tip?

The Bushites clearly feel that they can do anything they want, and are accountable to no one. This may turn out to be the beginning of the end in Iraq, but it also may very well be a time of great danger.