Tethered Swimming

“Gentlemen, it’s time we face up to the un-face-up-to-able.” - Mayor Quimby

The official website of the House of Representatives is not generally a place I go looking for laughs.  Their schedule does contain a truly profound piece of bullshit though, one worthy of our elected officials.  Tomorrow is listed as the start of the ‘Summer District Work Period’.  The Senate at least has the honesty to use the word ‘recess’ and while the image of United States Senators running around, playing tag and eating gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is funny, it pales next to the unintentional comedy of the ‘Summer District Work Period’.

While our legislative branch spends the month of August roaming the countryside, those fine, upstanding maniacs in the executive branch will be busy trying to find some way to justify continued fighting in Iraq.  I do not envy them their task.  This war has been lost for a while now and finding some way to keep it going long enough to see Bush the Younger safely out of office is becoming increasingly difficult.  The old routine of lying and saying that up is down and black is white has almost become inoperable and the money is going to run out at the end of September.

Sometime between now and then Robert Gates, the Eagle Scout from Kansas who just happens to be the Secretary of Defense, is going to sit down in front of Congress and tell the world all about the war in Iraq.  In broad strokes there are two things he can say.  One is the administration line and it goes something like this, “It’s been tough, but we’ve reformed our ways and now that we’re seeing progress this would be the worst possible time to pull the plug.”  The other is what opponents of the war have been saying for four years and it sounds like this, “American military involvement in Iraq has been a catastrophic failure, and at this point withdrawal is the least bad option.”

I don’t expect him to say either one of those things.  (For all we know he might barely say anything and just continue being the quiet man in the room.)  His report on the war will be something between those two extremes, how close he is to one or the other will, at most, help determine the speed of our inevitable retreat from that nightmarish land.  Ostensibly his much anticipated report is about the war, but in reality, like everything in the District these days, it is about President George W. Bush.

Robert Gates’ real job is to succeed where James Baker failed: he has to find a way to end the war that is acceptable to Bush the Younger.  Bush basically scoffed at the political lifeline his father’s friend threw him last December; but whether he wants one or not there is going to be a political reckoning about the Iraq War before he can scamper away from 1600.  Too many people are dying to just wait until the 2008 election can settle things and right now Robert Gates is the only man with the credibility to bridge the gap between the Capitol and the White House.  He alone is in position to create a political space where the anti-war crowd can be appeased by knowing that the war will end while the President can maintain what little remains of his dignity.

Losing a war is probably the hardest thing for a leader, any leader, to swallow.  For one thing losing wars is a very good way to get thrown from power, either by force of arms or peaceful political embarrassment.  On top of that there is the ultimate punishment for men with such vast egos: the eternal humiliation of being lumped in with history’s dimwits and losers.  A hundred years from now people may or may not remember Clinton’s presidency or Reagan’s, but they will definitely remember Johnson and Nixon.  Those are the two that lost a war.  Nixon even had to resign because he couldn’t abdicate in the normal flow of elections like Johnson.

Bush is in very real jeopardy of going down like they did, reviled and disgraced for all time.  Worse yet, of the two, his situation is far more like Nixon’s.  There is no election this fall to save Bush from presiding over the end of this war; something is going to have to be done this year.  The Democrats in Congress cannot go back to their constituents next fall and simply say, “Well, we forced a few vetoes.”  Similarly, Republicans in Congress do not want to be in a position in 2008 where they have to say, “I was for the war before I was against it.”  One way or another, this is Mr. Bush’s war.  He has to deal with it or face the possibility of being expelled from office like the man from Whittier.

Which brings us back to Robert Gates and his impending date with the United States Congress.  At his confirmation hearings at the beginning of the year Gates was lauded for being honest and not really wanting this deeply unpleasant job.  He was as different from his predecessor as two old, rich, white, Republican guys can possibly be.  Since then he has kept an amazingly low profile, especially when you consider that we have not one but two wars ongoing.  When his name does turn up in the newspaper it’s often in connection with some shockingly rational ideas like closing the Guantanamo prison and actually speaking with other countries before we start bombing them.  But he has stayed as mum as possible about the war between the rivers.

People who know Congress better than I do seem to think that the man to watch is the Republican Senator from Virginia, John Warner.  Warner certainly has Gates’ phone number, and when the Secretary goes in front of the cameras his presentation will hold no surprises for those Senators with an R next to their names.  The question is, how many people will go for it?  If Warner and a few other key Senators turn decisively from the President and back a compromise that funds the war in the short term but ends it in the long term it could find enough backing to pass.

Of course, the Administration might just figure that playing hardball has gotten them this far, so why stop now?  If that’s the case then Mr. Gates will head up the Hill and say that we’ve seen enough progress to justify continuation of this, ahem, new strategy we started back in January.  He’ll have a slew of well cooked numbers to back him up and if the sales job is really effective we might, maybe, see another extension like the one back in May.  But even that depressing scenario, which is about as much of a total victory as the Administration can hope for, will put us right back in the same situation a few months down the road.  Only when the money runs out that time, Robert Gates’ credibility will have been spent.

If last May is anything to go by the Pentagon can keep the war going for six to eight weeks beyond any fiscal deadline by stealing money from other parts of their budget, so there is some flexibility in the schedule.  But it is inconceivable that Congress will keep funding this war piecemeal every few months through November of next year.  This is one of the big reasons why obsessing over the presidential candidates already is especially pointless.  There is a huge political earthquake coming, a child could see it, and the landscape is going to be very different before anyone in New Hampshire casts a vote.  I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but I do know that we’re too far from the next election to just keep putting it off.