The Dems’ Iraq gap

IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE THAT DEMOCRATS in the U.S. Senate would use the war in Iraq to send a political message to the party faithful, as some did last week in voting for doomed resolutions to fast-track the withdrawal (or “redeployment”) of U.S. forces from that country. Trouble is, the message sent to the rest of the country may be that Democrats who are more liberal can’t be trusted when it comes to national security.

That message is likely to stick even if the Bush administration decides on its own to draw down the U.S. presence. Over the weekend, an administration official confirmed reports that Army Gen. George W. Casey has devised plans that could produce sharp reductions in U.S. forces as early as September and cut the number of combat brigades by nearly two-thirds by late 2007. But if President Bush follows that advice, he can say that he is simply living up to his oft-stated promise to defer to the judgment of battlefield commanders rather than play politics with troop levels.

Playing politics is, unfortunately, an apt description of last week’s Senate debate. It was mostly election-year posturing -- on both sides. The debate gave Republicans an opportunity to warn their red-state base that Democrats wanted to “cut and run.”

To no one’s surprise, both Democratic proposals failed -- one by a respectable margin, the other in a rout. By a 60-39 vote, the Senate rejected a “sense of the Senate” resolution by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) calling for troop withdrawals to begin by the end of the year, with no timetable for complete withdrawal. But even if the Levin-Reed resolution had passed, it wouldn’t have bound the president, any more than he was bound by an earlier bipartisan resolution expressing the hope that 2006 would be a “year of significant transition” in Iraq. A more substantive amendment proposed by Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wisc.) would have required total withdrawal by July 2007. It received only 13 votes.

Senate Democrats seemed not to mind that both proposals went down to defeat. What mattered, Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested, was that Democrats had gone on record in favor of a “change of course” while Republicans had embraced “an open-ended commitment.” Whether or not that political calculation survives Gen. Casey’s proposal, it would have been a mistake for the Senate to endorse even the “soft” redeployment language in the Levin-Reed bill. Advisory or not, such a statement could have emboldened Iraqi insurgents.

That said, Bush’s satisfaction that the two resolutions were defeated had to be tempered by a realization that even many Americans who don’t want to “cut and run” have grown impatient with the prolonged U.S. presence in Iraq. If the president does discernibly diminish the U.S. role -- citing military advice, not congressional pressure -- Republicans, not Democrats, are likely to get the credit. In that event, the Democratic proposals defeated last week will look like bad politics as well as bad policy.