When Iraq Finally Collapses The Electoral Wave It Sets Off In The U.S. Will Be Huge

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

August 8, 2007

The Turkish Ottoman Empire had the bad judgment to back the losing side in World War One. For its losing bet it got itself dismembered. And out of that redrawing of the map of the Middle East emerged a nation called "Iraq."

Less than 100 years later, thanks to the bad judgment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their merry band of neo-con "realists," Iraq no longer exists, except as a figment of everyone's imagination.

The Kurds of northern Iraq may call themselves Iraqis, but while their fellow citizens in the south have been engaged in mayhem, the Kurds have been busily building their own state, financed by the oil that fortuitously lies beneath the soil they control.

The largely Shia Iraqis of the south have devolved into anarchy, with militias and gangs struggling for control of the oil rich area around Basra and the only port that can handle the sale of oil from Iraq's pipelines. The "central government" has little control over Basra and the south. Even the British have been defeated in trying to quell the intra mural violence. The Brits once had 40,000 troops in the south. Now they are down to 9,000, and most of them will be gone within a year.

Baghdad is in the throes of one of the greatest mass exoduses in modern history. More than 2 million Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, and most of them former residents of Baghdad, have fled to Syria or Jordan or wherever they can find safety. Another two million have been forced from their homes and have relocated elsewhere within Iraq. The Sunnis who remain in Baghdad are being systematically exterminated or pushed out the door by the Shia-dominated government and its militia partners. Thousands of bodies pile up in the streets each month. Some summarily executed. Others who had the misfortune of standing in the wrong place when the bomb went off.

The number of Iraqi refuges and murder victims makes other current humanitarian crises, including Darfur, pale by comparison.

Because of the failure of the Maliki government to protect or serve Sunni neighborhoods, the government's Sunni partners have resigned from the cabinet. Because U.S. forces could not stop Sunni insurgents from conducting guerrilla warfare, now we are buying them off---presumably paying more than their former enablers from Saudi Arabia. Maybe we should just consider this an attempt to privatize our enemies.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi parliament is enjoying its 6 week summer vacation.

There is a very real possibility that before Congress (also on its summer vacation while Rome burns) finally gets around to voting to bring the troops home, our entire military effort in Iraq will be forced to beat a hasty retreat by collapsing events on the ground.

This is the situation President Bush tells us shows "promise." This is the reality that all Republican presidential candidates (except for Ron Paul), and most Republican members of Congress support with their words and their votes.

When the end comes it can hardly be neat and tidy. Whatever humiliation the U.S. is suffering now because of the Iraqi calamity will enter a new and uglier stage. Whatever risk we now see to our vital interests in the region will become even more tenuous and unsettling.

All of this will be played out against the backdrop of the 2008 elections.

No doubt the Republicans will try to pin the collapse of the Iraqi misadventure on Democrats who kept clamoring for withdrawal and in doing so increased the resolve of the "terrorists."

But it will take a mighty spin of the spin machine to steer the blame away from its rightful owners---those who insisted on this invasion and who kept cheer leading for it and paying for it over the years of the downhill spiral.

This will undermine Republican candidate fortunes the most, certainly, and properly. But Democratic presidential candidates and those up for reelection to the Senate and House who kept funding the war---and who keep funding it up to and including this moment---also will have much explaining to do to U.S. voters.

About six weeks ago, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, the Republicans' leading authority on foreign policy in the Senate, made waves with this statement: "A course change should happen now, while there is still some possibility of constructing a sustainable bipartisan strategy in Iraq. If the President waits until the presidential election campaign is in full swing, the intensity of confrontation on Iraq is likely to limit U.S. options."

Translation: Cut our losses now. Make our deals now with Iran, Syria, the Saudis and others in the region who are financing the guns and bombs being used in Iraq's daily bout with terror. Get out before we repeat the ugliness of Saigon, where thousands clawed their way to the roof of the embassy there desperate for a seat on the last departing helicopter.

But even after his speech on the Senate floor calling for a change of course, Lugar has continued to support a policy that he himself says "has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond,"

The polls and opinions of events and candidates in August, 2007 are likely to bear scant resemblance to polls and opinions of events and candidates after Iraq collapses into the anarchy that all today's events point toward. There's going to be shock, dismay and a flood of blame.

And the maelstrom may well dictate which candidate emerges to clean up the mess as our next president. Right now, it's not at all certain that the next president will be one of the current front-runners. The Iraq war voting backlash of 2008 could well make the 2006 Iraq war backlash seem like a ripple by comparison.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.