Peter Beinart, the New Republic‘s editor-at-large, has a piece in today’s Washington Post titled “A Non-Story Remakes the Race.” Beinart explains:
Last month, Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times live-blogged the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. As the discussion bounced from subject to subject, she marked the topic and the time, then gave her thoughts. At 8:34 p.m., it was driver’s licenses; 8:55, Pakistan; 9:57, the Supreme Court. By night’s end she had 17 entries totaling almost 1,500 words. And she hadn’t typed “Iraq” once. The candidates mentioned the war, to be sure. But it never took center stage. And with the first primaries just weeks away, that’s become the norm: Iraq wasn’t a major focus at last week’s Republican YouTube debate either. In the biggest surprise of the campaign so far, the election that almost everyone thought would be about Iraq is turning out not to be. And that explains a lot about which candidates are on the rise and which ones are starting to fall. The reason Iraq is fading is simple: Not as many people are dying there.
And the reason not as many people are dying there is pretty simple, too. It’s the surge. But it’s worth going back to see what Beinart thought of the surge in January, when President Bush first rolled out his new strategy for restoring order in Iraq:
In Iraq, sadly, the troop surge planned by George W. Bush probably won’t make much difference. After all, the United States has already surged–the military sent several thousand more troops to Baghdad last summer–and the violence only got worse. Moreover, the intellectual architects of a new surge–retired General Jack Keane and the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan–say it will require 30,000 more troops over 18 months to have a chance of success. But, according to most press reports, Bush is talking about no more than 20,000, and military officials say that number can’t be sustained for more than six months or a year. Some liberals don’t like the term “surge,” demanding that journalists call Bush’s plan an “escalation” instead. But, if the military is to be believed, “surge” is actually correct, because the United States can’t maintain a long-term escalation, which is one reason Bush’s plan will almost certainly fail.
If Beinart was too quick to declare the surge a failure, he might be getting ahead of himself yet again. Success in Iraq, as Beinart says, may leave more room in the race for a candidate like Huckabee, who has no foreign policy experience to speak of, but only because he isn’t pushing for a withdrawal just as there is a real hope of victory. As for the Democrats, the reason for their avoidance of the topic, I suspect, is that they’re still waiting to see which way the wind blows, and hoping against hope that things don’t get much better, preventing an awkward standoff with their antiwar base.
