Centerfield

Staying the Course

For a few weeks now, a certain set of recommendations and expectations has taken root among some on the right side of the political spectrum. There's a "rosy" scenario they discuss that involves transferring sovereignty in Iraq to a caretaker government, and then holding elections by the end of the year. The expectation is that the Iraqi parties and factions who win will be fervently anti-occupation and anti-U.S., and that they will ask us to leave.

This scenario is discussed, I suppose, as the "realistic" one -- the one that's fairly likely to happen. It's not ideal, from a U.S. perspective, but thought by some to be inevitable. Perhaps it is.

I think we all know the dangers of this path, but a new report by the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College puts it succinctly:

"The United States is gambling regardless of what it does; if a prolonged military presence threatens to delegitimize the new Iraqi government, a premature and abrupt withdrawal could create a security vacuum encouraging disorder, even civil war."

The "rosy" scenario involves, quite possibly, a short timeline of U.S. involvement, and holds the distinct risk of medium-term failure in meeting our basic goals.

Liberals have long offered us policies with similar prospects. Kucinich told us to "get the US out and the UN in" during the Democratic primaries, in spite of the fact that the UN doesn't have an army to send in to Iraq, and that no member countries are likely to contribute sufficient troops. Dean argued against sending more troops and publicly opposed the $87 billion in reconstruction funds. The liberal group MoveOn.org still runs ads against the $87 billion -- as if we had a viable alternative to spending that money short of withdrawal.

Enough voters on the left are against the war to push policies into the "short timeline" arena -- where we're expected to conclude what we're doing post haste and bring the boys home.

What we've entered, it seems, is a very strange period in our politics where words and impressions don't mean what they're thought to mean by average Americans, and where the spectrum of our opinion has folded back on itself.

Liberals and conservatives both seem to be engaging in what amounts to short-timeline thinking in Iraq. We'll be gone within a year. And hopefully things will turn out ok. Yet, in the public imagination, the administration is the "stay the course" side of the debate and the left the "cut and run" faction.

I suspect, in a way, that the right and left have folded over onto one another, and that moderate foreign policy realists are the only ones offering something at a genuinely different end of the spectrum.

Those ideas and proposals are floating around the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- a committee stacked with the most distinguished moderate foreign policy internationalists from both parties. Look at the statements of three committee members over the past many months, and you get a feel for it.

Just yesterday, Sen. Lugar put more bite into his rhetoric, criticizing the president directly. Hagel has made similar remarks for months. And Biden gave the most compelling and passionate plea for an alternate course in his closing remarks at the Senate Foreign Relation Committee hearings last Tuesday.

I note from a New York Times article that Lugar and Biden met with the president recently, and offered their suggestions in frank terms. "We were not shy, and it was about a 45- or 50-minute period," Lugar said afterwards.

What they're offering is typical of foreign policy internationalists. It's applauded by folks on the left -- featured prominently on Democratic blogs, for example. But it's not a good fit with significant elements of the liberal perspective on Iraq.

All three of these guys -- Lugar, Hagel, and Biden -- favored the Iraq war, and all voted in favor of the reconstruction funds. None of them assume the things that underlie the views of Dean, Kucinich, and the anti-war crowd. The U.N. will not take over in Iraq, nor will any country offer significant additional forces to assist with the occupation.

All three of these guys are more willing to expend actual resources in support of this mission and to see it through doggedly to as positive a conclusion as we can manage. In place of the idealist internationalism of the left, they offer a committed, realist internationalism.

Biden laid it out in clear, compelling terms in his closing remarks Tuesday. He knows his alternative plan well enough to pitch it spontaneously, without benefit of notes.

He begins by pointing out some of the basic facts. We're about to turn over sovereignty -- some of it in a month, and the rest by the end of the year.

We are unpopular in Iraq. And this means, with the approach of elections, that we can expect the leading factions to incorporate anti-American rhetoric in their campaigns -- perhaps with specific proposals to evict U.S. forces from their country.

Nobody will be able to afford politically to cooperate with us on an overt level. We're about to become very lonely in Iraq.

If we want continued influence -- if we want to "stay the course" in any practical sense -- we have to change the appearance of things dramatically.

Biden says we should approach the major world powers -- particularly those in NATO -- and get them involved in the political transition and the occupation. He wants to put an international face on the political process and a NATO face on the occupation.

He understands, of course, that none of these countries want to get involved. They will not -- and certainly have not -- responded to overtures from the likes of Powell, Armitage, Rumsfeld, or Bremer.

He thinks, however, that they might respond to a direct appeal from the president. If the president went to the world capitals, pleaded his case, and twisted some arms, he might in effect pull the world to the table in managing the Iraq transition.

In such a scenario, we might give the Iraqis someone else to deal with during this critical phase. They won't have to cooperate with Americans -- which will soon be politically poisonous. And they can keep a NATO-run force in country longer than an overtly U.S.-led force.

Biden doesn't make the standard Democratic assumptions about the practicality of this plan. He knows it's difficult. But he also sees what the stakes are. There is no "staying the course" without greater world involvement in Iraq. Having any influence -- and offering any help with security -- could depend on such measures.

If the president thought the success of his policy hinged on this critical factor, perhaps he could expend enough effort and political capital to drag a difficult international initiative into the realm of possibility.

That's what the moderate internationalists think. It's a debatable point -- the practicality of it is questionable -- but I, for one, suspect they're right.

Posted by William Swann at May 24, 2004 05:02 PM