At the end of this clip from ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos and George Will have this interesting exchange:

Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven't been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited.

As Stephanopoulos says, Wow.

Compare that to what William F. Buckley Jr. wrote the other day (which Drudge highlighted today in very important red lettering):

General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can't see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, "I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort."

The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Even though both Buckley and Will are careful to hedge slightly on their predictions, essentially two of the most respected and smartest minds in conservative politics just declared that the Republican Party will not only suffer greatly in 2008, but that it is in danger of becoming a minority party for generations.

I won't dispute the possibility of such a scenario, but we need to consider where exactly the Iraq war will fit in history. For instance, does Will's Depression-analogy hold up? The only answer is that we won't know for several years, if not decades. But right now I think it's still a far-fetched notion. The Depression was a world-changing event that lasted for over a decade and affected every aspect of society. As bad as Iraq is -- and for the fallen soldiers' families, it is incalculably worse -- the average American is simply not suffering on a level commensurate with the Depression because of the war.

As for their more general point that 2008 will be another rough year for Republicans barring any real change in Iraq, that will almost certainly be the case, as would Will's point that the White House will start to see defections by the fall if not earlier should the surge not produce noticeable results.