What Yglesias Said
By This has been another edition etc.:
The whole fracas of Petraeus, Crocker, MoveOn, etc. has had, to a good first approximation, no impact whatsoever on anything of any significance. Bush continues to be stubborn. Republicans continue to back Bush. The war continues to go poorly and continues to be unpopular. There was nothing else that ever could have happened. A bunch of editors and politicians talked themselves into believing that this September showdown was crucially significant, but they were all wrong and their theory never made any sense.
The only showdown that mattered happened months ago. Democrats passed a war appropriation that funded the phased withdrawal of troops. Bush vetoed that appropriation and said he would only sign an appropriation that funded open-ended war. Bush sought to portray a congressional refusal to appropriate money for an open-ended military involvement in Iraq as some kind of plot to leave the troops starving and without bullets in Iraq. The press largely bought into this frame, which was re-enforced by the fact that many leading Democrats immediately decided to buy into as well. The party then decided not to try to fight to reframe the issue but, instead, to accept it. Given that framing of the question, the only thing to do was surrender and give Bush his money. And given that precedent, the only thing to do is to keep on surrendering any time Bush rhetorically holds the troops’ well-being hostage to his preference for perpetual war.
That was a blunder — a decision that condemned hundreds of Americans to die in Iraq — and one that appears to have resulted from a total failure of the leadership to do any advance planning about their legislative tactics. All of September 2007 has been a meaningless sideshow.
All entirely correct. Whether MoveOn didn’t take out the ad or had chosen to sumperimpose a picture of Benedict Arnold on Petraeus makes absolutely no difference to anything. The war would have gone on anyway. The war would remain unpopular. GOP Senators would find some other way to run out the clock at the hearings that most people don’t watch because they’re at work and also find some other way of claiming that opposition to their disastrous war means hating the troops. It’s all a completely empty kabuki. (And to echo djw, I can’t believe Reid let a vote on this get to the floor.)