Can They Save Us?

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Monday, December 4 2006, 12:04AM

This week, the Iraq Study Group is expected to report to President Bush and the nation on options to help the United States in Iraq. Three years into the war, with nearly 3,000 American soldiers dead and no end in sight, the public is demanding answers. That was the message voters sent to Washington last month in the midterm elections. The Democrats won control of Congress for the first time since 1994, and all indications suggest they heard the public's message loud and clear. Now the question is: Did President Bush hear them?

This week's issues of TIME and NEWSWEEK raise the same question. The cover of TIME predicts "Bush will listen" while the cover of NEWSWEEK questions that assumption with the blunt headline, "Will Bush Listen?" I don't claim to have any special insight into George Bush's mind, but I do know this. If Bush listens to the Iraq Study Group and takes their advice, it may be the only thing that can save his presidency.

George Bush's Awkward Choice

On the surface, President Bush faces an awkward choice. He can either save his presidency, save face, or save the country. If he wants to save his presidency, he will take political cover provided by the Iraq Study Group and use it as an opportunity to reverse his position on American military presence in Iraq. If he only wants to save face, on the other hand, he will try to wait out the opposition by leaving American troops in Iraq and leave the mess for the next president to clean up.

If, however, President Bush wants to save the country, he's got to figure out a way to stabilize Iraq, engage regional partners, withdraw U.S. forces, and still be able to claim victory in the end. No one has much confidence that this president is up to that difficult task.

In reality, Bush's choice between saving his presidency, his reputation and the country is a false one. The truth is that they are intimately connected. If he is able to save the country from further disaster in Iraq, it will be the one thing that saves his presidency and saves him face.

Go Big, Go Long, or Go Home

NBC's Tim Russert summed up the conventional wisdom last week on "Meet The Press." Advisers now say that the U.S. has three options in Iraq: go big, go long, or go home. Go big means we deploy more U.S. forces in Iraq and do whatever it takes to stabilize the country. That's a reasonable position, but it's not popular back home and it's not clear we have the capacity to be able to sustain increased troop levels.

Go long means the U.S. government and the military prepare to slog it out in Iraq for years to come. That's not popular either, but there's a remote chance the public might buy the argument if the president came to us candidly and asked for our support for such a long-term policy instead of trying to deceive us into thinking that victory is imminent.

Go home is more obvious. It's what most Americans want to happen in Iraq. They want our troops to return home safely to let the Iraqis handle their own business and fight their own civil war. The last thing Americans expected when the war began in the spring of 2003 was that the U.S. would end up policing a civil war between divided Iraqi factions determined to gain control of the very country we destabilized with our invasion. But that's the situation we face right now.

Forget about immigration, tax cuts, Medicare prescription drug benefits and all the other items on the Washington agenda for the next two years. Whatever progress is made on those issues will not be enough to salvage the president's reputation if he does not control the situation in Iraq. Maybe the Iraq Study Group can convince the president to change course, and thus save us from Bush himself. If not, God save us all if he still doesn't get it.

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