(HOST) Commentator Olin Robison has been thinking about military strategy, politics – and how they influence one another.
(ROBISON) There is a long history in the United States of talented generals becoming accomplished politicians. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower come immediately to mind. It would be quite easy to produce a long list going back a couple of hundred years.
From time to time we get a talented general who is simultaneously a skilled politician. We have in General Petraeus such a person.
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, a career diplomat, both now in Baghdad, are both charged with producing an assessment of the so-called "surge" in Iraq and they are to do so by mid-September. The chances of these reports being negative are about the same as the chances of the proverbial snowball in hell. If these guys want to keep their jobs and there is good evidence that they do, then they will produce positive reports. You can bet on it.
I have long maintained that no significant foreign policy initiative by the United States can survive long term without broad public support. At the beginning there was broad public support for the invasion of Iraq. But no more. And so President Bush has a big problem.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney at the moment have very low public approval ratings, with the result that their assessments of how the war is going no longer carry enough credibility to entitle them to go forward as they clearly intend to do – at least for now. And so it was a bold stroke to put that evaluation process into the hands of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. Their report will be basically positive, leaving the President in the position quite simply of "staying the course" – to use his oft-repeated phrase.
It is a pity, really. Americans and other soldiers are dying daily; Iraqis are dying in very large numbers. There are dramatic and complex animosities in the region that literally go back centuries. All parties in the region agree on very little, but they do seem to now agree that the question is not whether the US will leave but when. The consensus views are split between early ’08 and early ’09.
President Bush, meanwhile, seems genuinely to believe that his historical fate will be the same as was the case for the late Harry Truman. Those who are old enough will remember that President Truman was terribly unpopular toward the end of his presidency but has since risen dramatically in public esteem. President Bush hopes and believes that will be his fate.
Others, indeed many others, simply do not agree. Time will tell.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.