The Politico is one among many publications covering the scrambling and division among Democratic leaders as they try and develop a new Iraq strategy now that it’s clear they cannot force a precipitous withdrawal. And this piece states pretty clearly that the last strategy failed:
Seeing the division on the left, it’s appropriate to ask whether this issue will break the Democratic party–or at least the current ruling structure on Capitol Hill. It’s starting to become clear that Joe Lieberman was the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for Democrats who recognize that the U.S. is engaged in a global war on terror. The extraordinarily negative reaction to Lieberman was seen as a ‘one-off’ event, directed at the one prominent Democrat who continued to stand with the president on Iraq, even after all other Democrats had fled. When Lieberman constituted the only real data point, you could argue that Democrats believed in the war on terror, they just disagreed with how the Bush administration was pursuing it. But now the Democratic base–as represented by the anti-war Netroots–has turned against Democrats who supported unwarranted surveillance of suspected terrorists operating abroad. They have turned against Democrats who opposed the Iraq war, but who believe that the president’s ‘blunder’ led the U.S. to have a strategic interest in a stable Iraq. The netroots are insisting on Democrats forswearing military action against Iran. But if the Democratic base insists that the party oppose aggressive surveillance of terror suspects and oppose military action against the leading state sponsors of terror, then it’s clear they want their party to oppose a war on terror. At best it seems, they favor a return to the Clinton era of half-hearted responses to terror attacks against U.S. interests — one which Americans recognized as ineffectual when terror came home on September 11. And does the Democratic base regard opposition to the war on terror as a matter on which ‘reasonable Democrats can disagree,’ in the same way that Republicans differ over the federal role in education, for example? Clearly not. We covered recently the effort to organize primary opposition to Democrats who worked too closely with President Bush. Now there is a new effort from the Soros-funded group MoveOn. So it’s not just about Joe Lieberman; it’s also about the few dozen Democrats who are more moderate on security issues. It seems that even leaving the decision to invade Iraq aside, the Democratic party ain’t big enough for DailyKos and MoveOn on the one side, and Brian Baird and Jerry McNerney on the other. I wonder if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi know the old fable about the frog and the scorpion.
