The GOP, a casualty of war

Haven't been paying close attention lately? Then you might be forgiven for assuming that the phrase "the war" refers to the battle being waged between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, rather than the events taking place in Iraq. Even with Gen. David Petraeus testifying on Iraq before Congress this week, most media commentary focused less on analyzing what's happening in Iraq and more on how Obama and Clinton used the hearings to jockey for preeminence.

During the first three months of 2008, the Pew Research Center found that "coverage of the campaign outstripped coverage of the war by a margin of more than 10 to 1," and that most of that coverage focused on the Obama-Clinton battle. That's because the war -- the real one in Iraq -- is kind of a downer, whereas the purported civil war within the Democratic Party is fun and exciting.

Much like the Iraq war, the Democratic primary race has involved the levying and spending of unprecedented amounts of money, as well as huge strategic blunders by a leadership team that boasted years of experience. At the same time, the Democratic race is unlike the Iraq war in ways that make it far more enjoyable to cover: The blood is only metaphorical, and there's plenty of juicy insider gossip (Mark Penn, anyone?).

Finally, much as the Democratic presidential nomination process sometimes feels like a quagmire, there is a withdrawal timetable. By the end of August, someone's forces will have abandoned the field entirely, and we'll have a clear winner.

Would that Iraq were so simple!

Although Democratic Party infighting makes good copy, the intense media focus on the Obama-Clinton battle obscures the fact that it's the Republican Party that's in deep doo-doo. The very factors that make us wish we could forget about the war in Iraq are driving a seismic shift in the American political landscape: the likely reversal of years of GOP electoral dominance.

Much as we try to repress it, we all know the whole sad Iraq story. False intelligence. Insufficient troops. No planning for an extended occupation. Looting. Sabotage. Insurgency. Car bombs and IEDs. Abu Ghraib. And five years later, what have we got? More than 4,000 dead U.S. troops, countless dead Iraqi civilians, no sustainable Iraqi political settlement, a U.S. military cracking under the strain, a new Al Qaeda franchise in Iraq, rising (but neglected) extremist threats in other parts of the globe and a U.S. taxpayer bill of $508 billion to date (with long-term costs in the next decade estimated to exceed $1.7 trillion). What's more, as Petraeus acknowledged this week, there's no end in sight.