Glued to Our Seats in the Theater of War

A week has passed since George W. Bush announced that U.S. troops will stay in Iraq in "a security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency." Last spring, those words would have evoked howls of protest from Democratic leaders. Now, scarcely a peep.

While the world was on August vacation, Republican and Democratic leaders moved toward a compromise. The outlines are clear enough: Some U.S. troops will start leaving Iraq soon, but tens of thousands will stay on indefinitely with a permanent mission of providing something called "overwatch." This open-ended "Korea model" seems to be a done deal. About the only issue left to debate is how fast the "transition" should happen, how quickly the troops that aren't staying should be "redeployed."

Peace activists who despair of the spineless Democrats should keep in mind that Bush and Cheney have compromised, too. In his most recent speech, just six years and two days after he became our tough-as-nails "war president," the Decider announced that he has decided to do what many Democrats and the peace movement have been demanding -- begin getting troops out of Iraq.

Yes, the numbers will be so pitifully small that many already claim they are meaningless. Nonetheless, it's a major shift in Bush's narrative. And that counts for something all too real, because the debate is hardly about policy any more. It's mainly about the stories we tell about policy -- and about "America." Perhaps it always was.

Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle -- the more mythic the better. It's no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a "theater."

Political "battles" are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist "drawdown" -- how many troops should leave and how soon -- is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives.

Last spring, with the President's surge plan seemingly floundering, it looked like the Democrats were winning that contest. Then, over the summer, the administration began to catch up -- and not just by accident. According to the Washington Post:

"Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge. From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and [early September], the office put out 94 such documents."

Call it a surge of words on the home front. But mounting a publicity blitz, no matter how well funded, is no guarantee of success. You have to put on a show good enough to sell tickets and elicit applause. So, why did the pro-war show draw a big enough audience (at least among beleaguered Republicans) that many key Democrats, frustrated by Congressional voting math and frightened for the 2008 electoral future, began to wave the flag of compromise -- and so few Republican Senators were willing to support even the Democrats' half-way measures?

A War President Who Can't Win the War

Part of the answer is revealed in the most astounding polling figure of recent weeks. A New York Times poll asked, "Who do you trust the most with successfully resolving the war in Iraq?" In response, only 5% of those polled gave the nod to the Bush administration, just 21% to Congress, but fully 68% -- more than two out of three -- plunked for "the military."