It's Clear: Voters Elected Dems to Protest Iraq

By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com. Posted November 8, 2006.

For the first time in American history, Americans have gone to the polls in wartime and rejected that war. Not only that, but they’ve done so overwhelmingly. Just as the election of 1932 was a seismic repudiation of the failed economic policies of the Hoover Republicans, the election of 2006 was a landslide against the Bush Republicans and their criminally misguided war against Iraq.

Amid pre-election polls showing that voters oppose “staying the course” by margins of as much as three to one, the American people have issued a sweeping mandate to the U.S. government: Get out of Iraq.

How that mandate is handled by Democrats and Republicans is yet to be resolved. And both energized Democrats and chastened, mainstream Republicans who want to change course in Iraq will confront a stubborn, blinkered president who, for the next two years, is still the commander-in-chief, and a giant stone Sphinx of a vice president, who has already declared that “it doesn’t matter” what voters think. “We've got the basic strategy right,” Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News  over the weekend.

It may not be popular with the public—it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right.

So the question is: In the face of an electoral sandstorm of Biblical proportions, how long can Bush and Cheney continue to do “what we’re doing”? Let’s look at five forces arrayed against them: the Democrats, the Republicans, the military, the U.S. bureaucracy and the Iraqi resistance.

First, the Democrats. It would appear, from their initial post-election reactions, that some Democrats get it. “We cannot continue down this catastrophic path,” said Nancy Pelosi, who will be speaker of the House. “And so we say to the president, ‘Mr. President, we need a new direction in Iraq. Let us work together to find a solution to the war in Iraq.’” But the Democrats have shown themselves to be lily-livered vacillators on Iraq: most of them voted for the war (and for the Patriot Act), and their ranks are shot though with pro-war right-wingers, not to mention the revived neocon Joe Lieberman. But, if they intend to retain or expand their solid majority in the House and their potential razor-thin, but all-important majority in the Senate in 2008 without incurring the wrath of the American majority opposed to the war, the Democrats can’t blow it. That will mean that they must become a resonant echo chamber for the anti-war voice of the American voter, who will demand nothing less. The Democrats must thunder from the pulpit, threatening to rain down hellfire, hail and brimstone on Republicans who want to stay the course—while scrutinizing every Pentagon budget request and holding investigative hearings into war crimes, abuses, cost overruns and mismanagement. Expect every general who’s ever called for Donald Rumsfeld’s scalp to headline a House or Senate hearing. And just wait ‘til the new leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees get their hands on those long-suppressed files on the lies that got us into war in 2003.

Second, the Republicans. On the eve of the election, Senator Joe Biden, the Democrat from Delaware, said that a dozen Republican senators had approached him to say that it was time to change course in Iraq. In fact, most mainstream Republicans had long ago written off the 2006 elections, but they are in full panic mode about 2008. If the war in Iraq is still raging in the summer of 2008 and the GOP runs a pro-war candidate (think John McCain), the party will suffer yet another landslide loss. That’s precisely why Representative Frank Wolf and Senator John Warner, both Republicans from Virginia, created the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker. The ISG report is expected in January, and it’s likely to call for what amounts to a withdrawal from Iraq. Expect Republicans to nod their heads sagely and praise Baker’s wisdom. Even more than the Democrats, it will be Republicans—contemplating the end of their political lives two years from now—who will demand an end to the war.

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Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

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