Iraq: Surge and U.S. Political Impact

Casualty Of The Surge, (Washington Post)…Michael Gerson, Oct 24, 2008.

The dramatic success of the surge in Iraq is not a central issue in the current presidential race. It did, however, set its shape — and may help determine its outcome in an unexpected way.

John McCain won the nomination of his party, in large part, as a vindicated prophet. After visiting Iraq in the summer of 2003, he argued on “Meet the Press” that “the men and women in the military are doing a superb job. . . . The problem is that they don’t have enough resources. There’s not enough of them, and we are in a very serious situation, in my view, a race against time.” McCain added, “Time is not on our side … 

This raises the question: If McCain benefited politically from being correct about the surge, why has Barack Obama not been punished for opposing it?

It was, after all, the single most important decision Obama has made as a public official. His judgment? “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” This initial reluctance is perhaps understandable; many shared it. But Obama persisted in his skepticism after the results became evident. Even in July of this year, he argued, “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.”

But the main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table.

So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency.

And McCain is left with a poignant comfort. He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war.