Craig Crawford's Trail Mix

Next month’s showdown with Congress over Iraq looms as George W. Bush’s last corral for maintaining the war agenda that is destined to be his legacy. Despite a lot of shaky nerves in Congress among his fellow Republicans, do not bet against the president once again outwitting a Democratic leadership determined to reverse the administration’s prosecution of the war.

Even though polls show that most Americans dislike Bush’s handling of Iraq, his political allies insist the public will not back anything that smacks of a congressional takeover of the situation. “They are not going to stand for a diminution of the commander in chief’s war powers without a viable alternative,” said Mary Matalin, a former senior White House adviser.

Still, the congressional Democratic majority is betting that the number of Republican defections will increase significantly in September, when this year’s fifth wave of votes aimed at forcing a troop withdrawal will occur.

Look for the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill to blunt the next Democratic effort by declaring that the U.S. is winning the war and that the surge in troops is making a difference.

That argument could be well served by the very event that Democrats had expected to be the turning point toward their anti-war point of view: a progress report from the military man running things in Iraq. Democrats once thought that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is widely respected by both parties for his expertise and candor, would come forth in September with a bleak assessment of the situation on the ground and that his pessimism would justify a meltdown of GOP support for Bush’s course in Iraq. But a different story is now emerging from the Petraeus camp, suggesting instead that he will report that the surge is working well enough to keep it going. And he is expected to conclude forcefully that withdrawal would only lead to bigger problems for both the United States and Iraq.

Encouraged by such previews of the Petraeus report, the White House is tapping sympathetic senators, including Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Independent Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, for what amounts to a full-scale political campaign to thwart the next drive against the war in the Senate, where the balance of power in the debate resides.

Even in the House, where a majority is clearly against the war, plenty of Republicans from conservative districts are still willing to go to bat against a withdrawal plan. “There are actually a few Republicans left who can explain and defend the policy — and, as importantly, the consequences of defeat,” Matalin said.

Even those pesky opinion polls, which have bedeviled Bush for so long, are beginning to show signs of better news to come for him. The latest Gallup Poll found that the proportion of those who said the additional troops are “making the situation better” rose 9 percentage points in the past month, to 31 percent; the share of those who said it was “not making much difference” dropped by 10 points, to 41 percent. To counter the positive developments the president will surely spotlight in next month’s debate, Democrats will be in the unenviable position of having to argue that the troops are actually failing. As a consequence, they will once again be portrayed by the White House as defeatists who do not support the troops.

For Democrats, Victory Through Defeat?

Nothing less than the constitutional calendar dictates that Bush needs to survive only this next test to keep his Iraq policy intact. After September he will just have to run out the clock on Congress for another 15 months — not a tough task for him, considering that he has successfully deflected the growing anti-war forces on Capitol Hill for the past couple of years. Even last year’s midterm election, transferring control of Congress to the Democrats, has so far not deterred this president’s fierce resolve to stay his course.

“The fall may be the only moment Congress is going to have to force President Bush to change directions in Iraq,” said Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “It’s highly unlikely there will be another confluence of events that can push this president to jump the track he’s been on.”

Still, Democrats are obligated to try, or they risk angering the legions of anti-war voters in their political base. Oddly, the party’s best-case scenario could be failure. If Democrats muster enough votes to override a Bush veto and impose a new policy on him, they’ll hand a rhetorical sword to the president and his GOP allies, who will argue for the rest of their natural lives that the United States could have won the war if Democrats had not succumbed to defeat. There is also a short-term advantage to Democrats in losing the September showdown: They could enter the 2008 campaign arguing that only a vote for a Democrat is a vote for real change in Iraq.

And that is one measure of Bush’s determination to keep control of this unpopular war through the coming debate: To do so, he seems more than ready to sacrifice Republican control of the White House or any hopes for his party to retake Congress next year.