Clift: Marketing the War

From a marketing standpoint, if you're going to roll out a new product, you don't do it in August; you wait until September. That's how former White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained the administration's strategy of waiting until fall to introduce a war resolution on Capitol Hill. Now it's five Septembers later, and a new team in the White House is getting ready for another big rollout.

This time the commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, holds center stage, and what he says and how he says it could reset the course of the war along with the remainder of the Bush presidency. This is White House counselor Edward Gillespie's first big test since he was brought into the inner circle last month. This is his show, and he's better positioned than the Texas loyalists he's replacing to pull off a win in the time-honored tradition of the Washington Fixer.

Gillespie is no silver-spoon Yale Republican. He's the son of a working-class Irish Catholic family, a graduate of Catholic University and a street fighter when it comes to politics. He's from the generation of operatives who came up when young people were becoming Republicans, drawn to politics by Ronald Reagan. He's partisan but practical. His strong conservative credentials are matched by his ability to work across party lines, especially when it meant making money. He joined with Clinton operative Jack Quinn to form a lucrative lobbying firm with clients that included Enron. Politics is a business like any other; it's not personal with Gillespie. He's got a vast network, and now he's like the fictional character in the "Godfather" movies, Tom Hagen, who says, "I have a special practice—I handle one client."

Gillespie won't deposit a horse's head on the bed of those who cross him. But he's got chits to collect and cards to play. We're about to see a media rollout that, if Petraeus plays along, will buy Bush more time and mousetrap the congressional Democrats. Those of us who've seen this movie before never thought we'd see a president worse than Nixon and a war worse than Vietnam, but here we are. Bush is asking Congress for $50 billion more for a war that's costing $12 billion a month, and he'll get it. The Republicans have done a masterful selling job over the summer spinning "progress" in Iraq, and they know how to count votes on Capitol Hill. There are 54 Democrats, all freshmen and sophomores, serving in districts Bush won in 2000 and 2004, says a Republican strategist who asked not to be named discussing his party's vulnerabilities, "and they're not going to go the wrong way on the war as long as things appear better."

Forget September. April is the real deadline. That's when the U.S. military can no longer sustain the surge, and the debate will then be over whether to return to pre-surge levels or begin a staged withdrawal. You can guess where Bush will be; he'll want to keep 130,000 troops (down from the current 160,000) in Iraq until he leaves office. The strategy of the war's architects is clear: keep enough troops in Iraq to provide a surface illusion of progress, and then when the Democrats (ideally, Hillary) win the presidency in '08 and pull out of Iraq, Bush and the Republicans can claim they were on the verge of a great victory against Islamofascism when the weak-willed opposition party betrayed the troops and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It worked with Vietnam, crippling Democrats on national security for decades because it was a Democratic Congress that pulled funding from the South Vietnamese government.

This scenario was suggested to me by Ernest Evans, a professor of political science at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Several hundred of his former students are currently serving in Iraq. In a recent e-mail outlining his views, he wrote, "I do not believe a single serious student of unconventional war believes that the surge will help the U.S. win in Iraq. The purpose of the surge is not to provide 'space' for Iraq's politicians but rather to provide 'cover' for DC's politicians."

There is one other thing to keep in mind, he wrote, and that is the extent to which Petraeus, a serious scholar and student of history, might be influenced by Vietnam. Nobody knows what he will say or how Gillespie and the White House will massage the message. The expectation is that he will fall into line, but he could surprise everyone by giving an unvarnished assessment of how truly bleak the U.S. options are in Iraq. The argument for why he may be the one to drop the horse's head on Bush's bed: the late Gen. William Westmoreland will always be remembered for the optimistic report he gave to Congress in late 1967, only to have the Tet Offensive occur shortly after, destroying the public's confidence that the war was winnable. In Iraq, the holy Muslim holiday Ramadan could bring heightened violence reminiscent of Tet. Petraeus has his reputation to protect, and being remembered as the William Westmoreland of the Iraq War is something no Army officer wants.