The (Non)Debate

clipped from www.nationaljournal.com Oddly, however, you don’t hear leading members of either party debating them. Bush and McCain don’t want to concede that the current strategy may be inadequate, so they harp on the surge’s tactical success. The Democrats don’t want to offer strategic proposals that concede that America may need to stick around a while in Iraq, so they harp on Bush’s strategic failures. With the economy in trouble and Bush blocking any change of course in Iraq until next year, maybe it is unrealistic to expect politics to address the real question. That question is not “Is the surge working?” It is “What else needs to be done to make the surge work?” The 2008 election cycle is ideally timed to take up this question—if only someone would. Maybe someone will. So far, however, the most dispiriting lesson of the surge is that on the crucial political front, which is where the war’s outcome will ultimately be determined, Washington is not coping much better than Baghdad.