The politics of Quagmire.

• Author: Dueck, Colin

IN POLITICAL terms, the war in Iraq seems to have followed what is now a familiar pattern in American history. A war initially undertaken in a remote location with a majority of the population's support and justified in sweeping and idealistic terms, turns into a frustrating military stalemate with continuing American casualties. Popular support for U.S. military intervention gradually but inexorably declines. The president who launched the war is politically damaged and finally paralyzed by the war's unpopularity. All of this happened, of course, to both Harry Truman in Korea and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; it appears to be happening to George W. Bush in Iraq.

The conventional wisdom is therefore that Iraq has become Bush's Vietnam and that it will ravage his party's electoral chances going into 2008, just as Vietnam ravaged the Democrats forty years earlier. But the differences between the cases are as important as the similarities, and politically speaking, the most important difference is that Bush is a Republican. Whatever the GOP's current difficulties, the Democratic Party has deep and enduring foreign policy problems of its own, and those problems are not likely to disappear any time soon.

IN 1950-52 as well as 1966-68, incumbent presidents, for leading the country into a seeming military quagmire, were punished by American voters. But the precise nature of the domestic political dynamic in those cases was somewhat different from the current situation. The Truman and Johnson Administrations each ultimately faced Republican presidential candidates in Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon who were capable of mounting winning challenges to existing policy. Both Eisenhower and Nixon possessed impeccable credentials as foreign policy hawks, the ability to convincingly convey strength and seriousness on national security matters and the political skill to straddle intra-party divisions as necessary. Moreover, neither candidate campaigned on a platform of straightforward withdrawal from Korea or Vietnam.

Instead, both campaigned on vague platforms that promised the preservation of national honor and success without really specifying how it would be achieved. Voters therefore did not support Ike in 1952, or Nixon in 1968, in simple opposition to war overseas. Rather, they voted for these candidates out of a hope that either would somehow be able to extricate the United States from military entanglements without defeat or dishonor. Each candidate's partisan and personal credentials on national security were a critical component in permitting this hope.

The same conditions do not really exist at this time for the Democrats. Ever since 2001, the Democratic Party has given little indication of its ability to come up with any sort of coherent approach toward national security. Part of this, of course, is the natural result of being out of office and in the minority, but part of it is also the result of deep divisions and...