Jophiel wrote:
What the average voter wants, in my opinion, is to feel secure that the Powers That Be have a grip on what's going on and a definate plan for a fairly swift resolution. If that means sending in an additional bevy of troops for training with the idea that we'll be done by [date], then so be it. It's still considerably more satisfying than "stay the course".
I agree with you in principle. Most of this has to do with the voters wanting/needing to feel that their government has a grip on the situation and knows what they're doing. The opposition in this case was very very suceessful at seeding doubt amoung the voters about this very issue. You're absolutely right that it's is not and never was a "mandate to leave Iraq". It was much more about believing that "stay the course" wasn't working.
Where I'm going to diverge is that I think that despite all the talk and statistics and whatnot, "stay the course" is pretty much what if anything is going to win this. The simple fact is that if we stay in Iraq long enough, the fighting will eventually die down, the nation will stabilize, and we can leave with a big "V". How long that takes and how many people will die in the process is unknown.
I think what we're seeing in Washington right now is a realization (by many Dems now that they're more involved in the process) of this simple fact. They'll dress it up with relatively minor changes. We'll increase troops for awhile. Then decrease them. Then shuffle them around the country. We'll try different specific varient strategies, and eventually things will die down. Of course, they'd have died down if we'd just sat there doing nothing and changing nothing, but we'll all think that it was the changes that made the difference.
We're in a situation in which the various power brokers in Iraq are going to determine how long this process goes on. They're going to keep fighting eachother for a bigger piece of the pie until they're convinced that they can't get any more from fighting. Then the fighting will stop. All we have to do is keep the country from falling appart entirely while this goes on. We have to keep the industry running and the goods and supplies flowing to the people.
If it takes a public believing that by voting Democrat they've changed things in Iraq to buy us the time for this to happen, then that's fine. We'll do a bit more razzle dazzle for a couple more years. Hopefully, that'll be enough time...
Another point:
PixelLord wrote:
1. North America for the most part hasn't the will for any sort of long and protracted war, no matter how "noble" the cause. Patriotism in the past fueled many campaigns, but it is now not enough in a global multimedia sound-bit filtered world.
No nation in the history of the world has "the will" for a long and protracted war. Never happened. The people never want to, it's only the degree to which the nation can continue fighting even if the people don't want to that allows wars to be sustainable for longer periods of time. In the US, what happened was that the War Powers Act changed the way we make war. While it closed up a loophole that was being used by Presidents to fight military actions without getting Congress to approve them, it also effectively removed the process of granting "war powers" to the president for larger and longer wars.
What this means is that all wars are fought by committee. In this case a committee that is beholden to voters in a relatively short period (the full house and 1/3rdish of the senate every 2 years). There's a reason the Founders separated the powers up and put the power to conduct war into the executive branch. It was specifically so that the day to day operation of that war would not be subject to the politics of the day. Once congress declared war, that was it. They had no more say in the matter. Now, the fact that congress can pull the plug on the war (or even specific aspects of it), means that political pressure from "the people" will have a direct impact on the way any war is carried out. Some may think that's a good thing. Representation of the people and all that. But I think the track records of wars in the last half century is a pretty good indicator that this pretty much always lead to disaster.
And that's for pretty much the reason you point out. Warfare is never popular. It's sometimes necessary, but it's never popular. The problem with the way we're set up right now (the US that is) is particularly screwy. The people will rile up and push for war if the reasons are felt strongly enough. But their desire to continue fighting will tend to wane after about a year or so. The problem is that we have invested both the power to start wars and the power to limit, modify, and end them all in Congress, which is the house most directly influenced by those people. The danger is that Congress will not treat the matter of starting a war with the thought that they would if they knew the were handing the keys of the castle to the president and would have no more say in the matter. Thus, we'll get into a war more easily then we should, and then lose interest as popularity wanes and leave a disaster behind us.
It's a pretty screwy way of handling things IMO. I have a particular dislike for members of Congress who voted for the war in 2002, and within a year or two were calling for withdrawal of some form. You don't declare war with the intention of only fighting it until your constituents back home aren't happy about it. That's insane. You should commit to the completion of the goals of the war *before* voting for it. Flip flop on anything else, but not a declaration of war. If you vote for it, you need to support it until it's done.
And this is the bit that really kills me. We haven't "lost" in Iraq. We're still fighting. Soldiers are still dying. But that's what war is. The only way we lose this thing is if we withdraw before Iraq is stabilized. Why then does that seem to be the one thing everyone wants to do? Isn't that nuts? I think so...