Who Lost Iraq? The Political Question

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29, 2006 — -- If the U. S. Intervention in Iraq -- begun in 2003 -- ends badly, there will surely be consequences, not only in the geopolitical sense, but on the American political scene. But how that plays out and who, in the end, will be picked by the voters to blame, is uncertain at this point.

The first instinct is to say that George W. Bush and the Republicans will get the blame. It is his policy, and, until recently, their almost monolithic support of the policy that got us into Iraq and clearly bungled the aftermath of the invasion. And certainly, in this month's elections the Republicans suffered because of it. But what about the longer run?

When Richard Nixon, a Republican president, pulled American troops out of Vietnam after losing more American soldiers there during his presidency than did his Democratic predecessor Lyndon Johnson, it turned out to be the Democrats --- affiliated with George McGovern's early call for Vietnam withdrawal --- who were punished for years as being a party "soft on defense."

When Mao Tse-tung and the Communists forced Chiang kai-Shek and his nationalists out of mainland China in 1949, a furious debate raged in the United States over "who lost China?" The Republicans blamed Harry Truman and his State department, but history has concluded that no one on this side of the Pacific Ocean was to blame: the corrupt Nationalist rulers themselves lost China.

So, when President Bush begins to publicly question what the Iraqi government's plan is for success -- and the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin says we must force the Iraqis to do more for themselves by beginning a troop withdrawal next year -- it is certainly possible, no matter how illogical, that the American voter will conclude it was the Iraqis who are to blame for the mess created there.

We Americans hate to lose, and we hate to accept responsibility for our mistakes. Japanese-Americans, interned as if they were potential terrorists at the beginning of World War II, finally got their apology from our government --