Great power and great responsibility

So, America has turned blue, the color of Democratic victory. Meanwhile Iraq is turning a pallid green, the color of Shiite fundamentalism and dead civilians. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had it right in her victory speech on Tuesday night when she proclaimed, "Mr. President, we need a new direction in Iraq ... we cannot continue down this catastrophic path." But what will that new direction be?

Despite former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld '54 's resignation, President Bush remains convinced that Iraq is a playground for Jihadists and the key battleground for the so-called "war on terror." Even if you regard this as legitimate, as opposed to a barely-disguised attempt to court public opinion by keeping the country in a never-ending conflict, the fact remains that most Iraqis regard the presence of foreign troops on their soil as a provocation — a message the British have finally taken to heart in southern Iraq, much to Prime Minister Blair's chagrin. Nonetheless, if the election hadn't gone the way it did, I suspect Bush might have gone for one last push and upped the numbers of troops in Iraq significantly.

But the election did go the way it did and not as the President wanted. Given that Democrats now have control of both houses of Congress, his hands will be tied. It will be impossible for him to send more troops into Iraq, because the Democrats will fight him every inch of the way. They could make life very difficult when it comes to this year's Foreign Operations Bill or the yearly Supplemental needed to keep the American project in Iraq ticking over. According to the National Priorities Project, which uses figures from congressional appropriations, the costs of the war now run at around a staggering $341 billion.

But let us be optimistic and imagine that both sides — the Democrats and GOP — that is — rather than Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis — can settle their differences for long enough to recognize that America is losing this war and to agree on decisive action. If the Democrats are smart, they will force Bush to accept and implement the ideas coming from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by former secretary of state James Baker '52 and former congressman Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), which is due to report next month.

All the signs are that Baker and Hamilton will recommend that the Iraq conflict be "internationalized." This will not be an easy message for the President to swallow. According to a source close to the commission, Baker and Hamilton will argue that no interested party should be excluded from direct discussions with America over the war in Iraq.

In practice, this means the administration will have to sit around the table with the likes of Syria and Iran, repugnant as that may be. It also means giving up on the neo-conservative project for regime change and all that "axis-of-evil" nonsense, giving renewed attention to the festering sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and focusing on how to broker a meaningful consensus between those in the region currently fighting a proxy war in Iraq — that is, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Kurds and, to a lesser extent, Turkey and the Gulf states.

With the appointment of Robert Gates as defense secretary — himself a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission — the signs are that Bush himself may be looking for a way to walk back from his position of indignantly castigating Iran and Syria. But direct talks have so far been anathema to his administration, while the Iran-Syria Operations Group in the State Department is still busily plotting regime change. Bush will find it difficult to retreat rhetorically without being accused of hypocrisy.

But what's the alternative? As Wilson School professor Joschka Fischer has warned so starkly, it is a regional Arab-Iranian war masquerading as a civil war in Iraq — with all the loss of American lives, security and prestige that this entails. Incidentally, forget about European schadenfreude as the chaos in Iraq boils over —even the French would much rather have a strong America keeping the world safe than a nuclear Iran on the rampage.

The opportunity that control of both houses of Congress affords the Democrats therefore means that they will have to get their act together. After two years of squabbling, internal division and catcalling from the sidelines, they too will bear part of the responsibility for how America acquits itself in Iraq. They will have to work with the president to implement a coherent strategy to handle the mess in the Middle East and figure out how to bring American troops home without destabilizing the region any further.

Let's hope this opportunity will not be squandered. For the Democrats, what's at stake is their chance to reclaim America's national security agenda and win the ultimate prize of commander-in-chief. For the rest of the world, it is Iraq's impending implosion that hangs in the balance. Victoria Whitford is a graduate student in the Wilson School and a contributor to The Daily Princetonian. She worked for for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Iraq from 2004-5 and the U.S. Department of State's Office of Iraq Affairs from 2005-6. This article represents her personal opinions, not the views of either organization. She may be reached at whitford@princeton.edu.