WILL IRAQ CAUSE VOTERS TO SHUN DEMOCRATS AFTER TROOP PULL-OUT?

I read Juan Cole's essay today in his essential blog Informed Comment on the bad choices to be inherited by the next president (probably a Democrat) as far as Iraq. Cole believes that there are three wars being fought right now and continuing into the future: one for control of Baghdad between Shias and Sunnis, one for control of the oil in Kirkuk in the north, and one for the oil in and around Basra in the south. Cole believes that these wars will continue to smolder for the next president when we finally are liberated from Bush. As a matter of fact, the hard choices will be faced by the next president because Bush just wants to push off the inevitable necessity to deal with them.

I agree. We all know Bush is just looking for time when he says the next six months are crucial. A denouement is always pushed off to "the next six months," writes Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post today.

"It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments. Appearing before a joint hearing called by the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus probably won the respite Bush wanted when he said that U.S. military objectives "are in large measure being met.""

But Cole takes too pessimistic a view on the political ramifications of leaving the seemingly insoluble problems of Iraq to a Democratic president. Cole believes that just as the bloody end to the VietNam War caused Gerald Ford to be a one-term president, so the bloody upheaval resulting from a pull-out of U.S. forces under a Democratic administration will cause American voters to reject the Democrats after one presidential term and install Republicans in both the executive and legislative branches who will then remain in power for years to come.

Writes Cole:

"But in all likelihood, when the Democratic president pulls US troops out in summer of 2009, all hell is going to break loose. The consequences may include even higher petroleum prices than we have seen recently, which at some point could bring back stagflation or very high rates of inflation.

"In other words, the Democratic president risks being Fordized when s/he withdraws from Iraq, by the aftermath. A one-term president associated with humiliation abroad and high inflation at home? Maybe I should say, Carterized. The Republican Party could come back strong in 2012 and then dominate politics for decades, if that happened.

"It is all so unfair, of course, since Bush started and prosecuted this disaster in Iraq, and Bush is refusing to accept responsibility for the failure, pushing it off onto his successor."

But I don't think this bleak prediction is inevitable or even very likely. First, I don't think that Obama or Clinton or Edwards is going to call for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. soldiers. The threat of genocide or fratricide in Iraq looms too large in such a scenario for the next president to allow it. Second, a Democratic president is more likely to emphasize negotiations and diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors, namely Syria and Iran and even with Saudi Arabia. Negotiations and diplomacy are the key to quiet down and calm the bloody murderous feelings rampant today in Iraq. Third, the international community will be more likely to support the United States under a new Democratic administration when it sees that it is less war-like and bellicose than Bush/Cheney.

So I am not ready to see a trap for the Democrats that Juan Cole lays out or recognize its probability just yet.