Is there anything meaningful to be learned from the revelation, in an article in today’s Washington Post, that September will be a “decisive deadline” for the Bush Administration, and that the GOP lines are breaking?

Since nobody thinks that the “surge” is working, or has any chance of ever working, can we really expect Congressional Republicans will fall in line with Democratic efforts to end the war?

I’m not holding my breath. The only three Republicans quoted in the article, Susan Collins of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota, are, not surprisingly, senators from blue states that are up for re-election next year. There aren’t enough of those to get the 16 votes (to say nothing of the 72 House Republicans) that are needed to over-ride Bush’s veto and end the war.

Smith and Collins are widely considered moderates, but it’s simply amazing to watch the speed with which Coleman has morphed from a down-the-line Bush supporter to an “independent” centrist. We’ll see if it’s sufficient for him to be good enough, or smart enough, doggone it, to make people like him enough to vote for him again. It’s Paul Wellstone’s seat, after all.

But 28% of the country still thinks George Bush is doing a good job, and that 28% is going to form a huge part of the Republican primary vote, which explains the slightly bloodthirsty atmosphere (”gates of hell”, “he wil die”, “killed with a dull axe”) of the GOP debate last week. It also means that individual Republicans are going to get some strong pushback from their base against any proposed compromise or oversight.

President Bush wants to stay the course until 2009, and make Iraq Barack Obama’s problem. Republicans in Congress don’t want to go through another election about Iraq, because doing that would almost certainly give President Obama huge Democratic majorities with which to work, and drastically limit the ability of the GOP to block his agenda.

I lied when I said the only quoted Republicans were the three moderates. John Boehner was in there too, basically walking back the idea of a real deadline: “By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn’t, what’s Plan B.”

That’s the exact same quote we’ve been getting from the GOP for at least three years now. The deadline is always a few months away (and September is already turning into October). The requirement of actual progress again measurable benchmarks turns into a updated news report. How well is this working? Why not just ask John McCain; I hear he took a nice stroll through a Baghdad marketplace. Just like Indiana in the spring.

And aren’t we already well past Plan B? We’ve had various strategies and surges and town-clearing operations without end for eight Friedman Units by now. None of it has made any difference, because the problem in Iraq is fundamentally one that cannot be solved with American troops.

The sooner the GOP returns from the gamma quadrant and realizes this, the better off the country will be.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 9:21 am, 8 May 2007 and filed under 2008 Elections, War and Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.