"As president, I will do what this president has failed to do," Clinton said in response to Bush's speech last Thursday. She said she would "recognize reality and end the war responsibly."
The Democratic candidates say they want to send home one or two brigades every month. Both candidates have said that, just in case things get out of hand, a "residual force" will remain -- but of indeterminate size.
"What I propose is not -- and never has been -- a precipitous drawdown," Obama said in a speech in Fayetteville, N.C., in March, on the anniversary of the war. "It is instead a detailed and prudent plan that will end a war nearly seven years after it started."
The Democrats' withdrawal plans are not without wrinkles. A central assumption is that the threat of a departure of U.S. forces will stir real action on the Iraq political front. "My plan to end this war will finally put pressure on Iraq's leaders to take responsibility for their future," Obama said in his March speech. "Because we've learned that when we tell Iraq's leaders that we'll stay as long as it takes, they take as long as they want."
But there is scant evidence that the disparate factions in Iraq will respond positively to such pressure. And it poses considerable risk, as Petraeus pointed out to Congress last week. "The recognition that we are drawing down obviously does put pressure on them," Petraeus agreed. "And what we want to do is put enough pressure on them to generate productivity activity, but not so much pressure that they go into their corners, hang on to what they've got, and posture themselves to take on each other, once we no longer have the capacity to keep everybody making way together." In other words, the various factions might choose to hunker down and get ready for an even bigger civil war once the U.S. presence diminishes.
Obama's national security advisors argue that there is evidence the Iraqis will cut whatever deals are necessary once they realize U.S. troops are on the way out. In fall 2006, Sunnis in western Iraq agreed to call off attacks against the U.S. Marines and to focus on killing al-Qaida in Iraq. Dubbed the "Sunni awakening," this kind of local deal making has resulted in the most dramatic decline in violence in Iraq. Obama's camp claims that the Democrats' triumph in the 2006 elections partly motivated this sea change among the Sunnis because it signaled the possibility that a U.S. withdrawal was more imminent.
But it's difficult to discern whether the U.S. elections were a real factor. And there isn't any evidence that the success, regardless of what catalyzed it, would be replicated on a national scale with a major withdrawal of American troops.
Still missing from the Democratic candidates' calculations is just what the end picture might look like. What version of Iraq would pass muster with respect to U.S. interests and responsibilities in the region?
The answer to this question is difficult without any good options left in Iraq. Indeed, the leitmotif in the private discussions with the national security advisors was their acknowledgment of the devastating damage done by the Iraq occupation and the deterioration of U.S. military readiness during the Bush administration.
There are experts advocating relatively detailed and potentially realistic strategies and outcomes for Iraq. Biddle, who also served as a member of a senior advisory group on Petraeus' staff in Baghdad in March and April of 2007, is one of them.
His basic argument is that the surge did not promote national political reconciliation. But the Sunnis did agree to a truce. And Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has also stuck to a cease-fire (at least at the time of this writing).
These are local victories, but victories nonetheless. The White House has called this "bottom-up" reconciliation, though so far it remains stalled mostly at the bottom.
Biddle suggests basically forgetting about any central Iraqi government at the top for now and instead concentrating on duplicating these cease fire agreements across Iraq. That would amount to a patchwork of semiautonomous regions, creating, hopefully, a relatively peaceful whole.
"I think the bottom-up approach has the potential to produce stability in Iraq. It is not a guarantee, but it is far and away the most plausible possibility at the moment," he said. "The stability it would provide is not going to be Eden on the Euphrates. This is not going to produce a Jeffersonian democracy and act as a beacon of freedom for the Middle East and all the rest any time soon," he added. "But a stabilized Iraq that looks a lot more like Bosnia or Kosovo rather than Germany or Japan [after World War II] would nevertheless meet the critical American objectives of this war at this point."
This might take fewer troops than McCain wants to keep in Iraq. But it might also take more troops than Obama and Clinton, with their pledges to begin withdrawing, want to leave there. It may be that none of the three have a terribly convincing plan for how to resolve America's ongoing foreign policy nightmare.
About the writer
Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C. Read his other articles here.
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