Defeat for the party of defeat

Richard Cohen:

By official count, The Washington Post's 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline "How the GOP Could Win." It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow's ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for another four years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.

It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will repeatedly hear in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, "They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating."

In my 2007 column, I compared this presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious -- the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in '72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers -- even men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, unruly and ugly to look at. It might, however, look like a tea party compared to what could happen in Denver this August.

At the moment, no one can figure how the Democrats are going to get a nominee. What the party needs is someone like George Mitchell, a senior figure of trusted wisdom who might be able to do what Howard Dean, the party chairman, clearly cannot -- avoid the train wreck everyone can see coming. But barring either Mitchell or a miracle, neither Clinton nor Obama can garner sufficient delegates on their own. It might take a combination of superdelegates and a revote in Michigan and Florida -- punished for holding unauthorized primaries -- to come up with a nominee. By the time that happens, the Democratic Party will be one, huge, dysfunctional family.

In that 2007 column, I did not take the surge into account. Putting an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq has indeed made a difference. It has not won the war and it has not enabled American soldiers to come home, but it has dampened the violence there -- notwithstanding the carnage on Monday. Overall, civilian deaths are down. Overall, military deaths are down. To that (limited but important) extent, the surge has worked.

When I mentioned 1972 and Vietnam to an important Clinton adviser, he pointed out that Nixon initially won in 1968 by saying he had a secret plan to end the war. That nonexistent plan was still apparently unfolding four years later. In addition, Nixon made opposition to war seem unpatriotic and defeatist. He exploited the war, exacerbating cultural divisions.

John McCain lacks Nixon's raw talent for hypocrisy, so I don't think he'll go that far. But he will make his stand on the surge and it will be, for him, the functional equivalent of Nixon's secret plan. McCain's plan, he will say, is to win. The Democrats' is to surrender. The issue, if he frames it right, will not be the wisdom of the war, but how to get out with pride.

...

It is not about pride. It is about the importance of victory to the future security of the country and the future avoidance of insurgencies. Democrats think you can avoid insurgencies by not participating. They are wrong the insurgency will happen anyway and people who have hate us will succeed and they will have no interest in negotiating anything with us.

If we demonstrate that insurgencies can be defeated we will face fewer of them in the future the way we face fewer conventional challenges now. We will also have a friendly government in place in the middle of the Middle East and a stronger position to influence events in the future when adversaries understand that they cannot threaten us with an insurgency if we do not give in to their demands.

That is the real choice.