Congressional Democrats are enmeshed in a dilemma that became inevitable once they took over both chambers of Congress last November. At the time, I made the point that Congressional authority over foreign policy is limited, and that by losing sight of this Democrats would risk assuming the blame for a disaster in Iraq that was not of their own making.
The House has passed a non-binding resolution denouncing the surge. In the Senate, Democrats fell just short of the 60 votes needed to bring that resolution to the floor. The maneuvering won't stop there. President Bush has shown no appetite for heeding the will of a weary and frustrated public that mostly wants out of Iraq. Anti-war voters are understandably insistent that Congress go beyond hortatory measures and stop Bush from continuing to escalate.
Democrats face a genuinely tough challenge: On the one hand, they won control of the Congress with a mandate to halt Bush's folly in Iraq and non-binding resolutions are, by definition, half-measures. On the flip side, though, Democrats cannot afford to be accused of withholding support for the troops. Moreover, restricting funds won't, in itself, put the war on a wiser course. And it may give Bush the ability to argue that future failure in Iraq ought to be blamed on Congress not him.
According to this account, into this mix comes a crafty proposal by John Murtha. Rather than holding back funds wholesale for the surge, he wants to attach requirements for high levels of readiness among additional troops to be deployed in Iraq, standards he believes the Administration cannot meet. This will de facto slow the surge, while allowing Democrats to be on the side of protecting the troops from unfavorable battlefield conditions.
While this is clever, both political and policy considerations ought to temper enthusiasm. First of all, the Politico website has already dubbed Murtha's proposal a "slow bleed" for the Iraq mission. As long as the President refuses to moderate his ambitions, forcing him to pursue them on a strict diet of troops and resources may only starve existing troops in the field of much needed support and rest. Leaving 130,000 troops exposed in Iraq as political support drains away in Washington is not an appealing prospect. At the same time, though, the fact that the President will ignore repeated messages from the Congress and the public is anything but a reason to shut up.
Policy-wise, as Joe Biden has been forcefully arguing, calling for redeployment or putting strings on the surge may boomerang to harm US interests unless these steps are accompanied by a coherent plan to contain the war and prevent al Qaeda from turning Iraq into a worthy successor of Taliban-led Afghanistan. My own thoughts on what such a plan might look like are in this article I published along with Charles Kupchan at The American Prospect. Biden's proposal dovetails in some respects, but stresses the kind of tri-partite federal solution he and Les Gelb have long advocated.
Almost more important than the specifics of any proposal is the need for Congressional opponents of the war to coalesce around a defined alternative to the President's current policy so that they are not just opposing surge, but proposing something in its place. Failing that, Democratic proposals risk looking like wanton obstructionism.
The sort of plan progressives need is not a comprehensive blueprint along the lines of the Iraq Study Group, an ambitious agenda that collapses beneath the weight of the need to implement dozens of complex, politically difficult and high-risk steps simultaneously. Proposals should instead focus on a stripped-down prescription addressing the immediate question of what to do with the troops now on the ground in Iraq. What all progressive proposals are likely to have in common is deescalation and a series of steps aimed at containment and mitigation of the conflict through a significantly reduced US troop presence.
It will not be easy for Democrats to agree on an alternative: none of the options for Iraq are good, and most sound plans carry a high-risk of failure. An alternative plan should not aim to go into great specifics: these will necessarily be worked out by civilian and military leaders who are actually in charge. But the anti-surge crowd should lay out what it sees as the critical policy objectives now, and some ideas as to how they can be achieved.
To reach agreement on alternatives the Congressional leadership should ask Members to proffer their own visions, but then be willing to quickly put these aside in favor of consensus options that - while imperfect - meet the relatively low threshold of being preferable to the current course. The anti-war left should likewise acknowledge that a compromise deescalation proposal capable of gaining political traction is better than a purist plan that will go nowhere. While progressives have struggled in the past to forge this kind of discipline, the political stakes here are high enough - and the Congressional leadership strong enough - that we stand a chance.
By offering a consensus alternative progressives avoid being tagged as unable to do more than criticize. If their proposal is adopted by the President, it de facto becomes his, meaning that he is accountable for its success or failure. If he rejects it, he at least cannot criticize measures like the Murtha plan for simply cramping his style without proposing an alternative.