A Republican Speaks for Me

Leaving Iraq, Honorably
By Chuck Hagel Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page B07

There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis -- not the Americans.

Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited. There will be a new center of gravity in the Middle East that will include Iraq. That process began over the past few days with the Syrians and Iraqis restoring diplomatic relations after 20 years of having no formal communication.

What does this tell us? It tells us that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest -- without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years. The Middle East is more combustible today than ever before, and until we are able to lead a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, mindless destruction and slaughter will continue in Lebanon, Israel and across the Middle East.

We are a long way from a sustained peaceful resolution to the anarchy in Iraq. But this latest set of events is moving the Middle East in the only direction it can go with any hope of lasting progress and peace. The movement will be imperfect, stuttering and difficult.

America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership -- not an American divine mission.

The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We've already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.
We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.

It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder -- one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead.

To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.

The writer is a Republican senator from Nebraska.

More on the End of Ideology

It looks like I'm not the only one who sees 2006 as marking the dying gasp of 20th century ideological politics. Matt Bai writes today in the New York Times Magazine: "The era of baby-boomer politics — with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all — is coming to a merciful close." With this election, the Democrats have become a 21st century party, assembling a coalition committed to effective, pragmatic leadership; the voters rejected the GOP based not on ideology but on the incompetence born of their ideological rigidity. The Democrats, in the long run, benefited from the earlier disintegration of their ideological position, as even the word "liberal" became a pejorative; Democrats have spent over a decade moving away from ideological positions to craft policies that appeal to the growing pragmatic center. According to a new poll by Stan Greenberg, the word "conservative" has become almost as unpopular as "liberal"; but the old ideological right remains firmly in control of the Republican Party.

Death of a Paradigm?

The conventional paradigm of American politics conceives of politics as a struggle for dominance between forces along a continuum between liberalism and conservatism. Policy ideas, politicians and parties are characterized as liberal, conservative, or moderate depending on where they fall on this continuum. The recent Congressional elections don’t make any sense within this paradigm, and point to the disintegration of these categories in our politics.

People calling themselves "conservatives" these days don’t really fit in the category. They have supported an ill-considered intervention abroad that has squandered America's moral and political capital; if they had stuck to conservative principles of realistic, wise and careful stewardship, we would not be in Iraq today. They also have run up the budget deficit in the most extraordinary manner, violating the principle of "fiscal conservatism." They urge greater government intrusion into our private lives, abandoning the libertarian impulse of old conservatism. Conversely, the most recent "liberal" president declared that "the era of big government is over;" balanced the budget; reformed welfare in a way that angered conventional liberals while empowering the program's beneficiaries; and presided over a record economic expansion – enriching all Americans, but especially the business community.

Alleged "conservatives" are no longer conservative. At the same time, liberals like myself have become much more pragmatic and have recognized the limitations of government. It's time for a new paradigm.

An Organizing Idea

Looking back over my posts so far, I've noticed a word that keeps coming up: the word is "community". Community is a very powerful idea, one that evokes something very deep and important; it speaks to one of those basic human drives (some have said the most basic), the urge to be connected.

But community is about more than connection; it also is about seperateness. The ideal of community presupposes distinct members who bring diverse contributions to the whole. It is the members' sharing of something with the whole that makes them a part of it; but it is their adding something to it that makes them valuable to it. Our communities are where we work out who we are in the world -- how we are connected to others, and how we are different. A strong community celebrates both the connection and the difference.

This idea of community seems to bring together my own ideas about politics -- it is the organizing principle that animates all the rest. And when leaders appeal to this principle, it brings out the best in us. That's why it's a principle worth understanding better. But that's for another post.

Katrina as Symbol

The Iraq war represents our sins of commission; Katrina represents our sins of omission. The shame of our response to Hurricane Katrina is that it is a failure of the fundamental obligation of a community -- the obligation to take care of its own. To me, our failure to respond appropriately to Katrina's devastation is a powerful symbol of our American community's broader failures: our failures to take care of the most vulnerable in our society.

Our country's severely mentally ill population walks the streets, recategorized as "homeless." Nearly 10 million children are uninsured. Schools serving our poorest children are poorly staffed and disintegrating. Decent housing is increasingly out of reach for a substantial portion of the population. In the neighborhoods where they can live, crime is rampant. And the list goes on.

I can't understand why our progressive Congressional and Presidential candidates have not latched onto the Katrina disaster as the powerful symbol that it is. Making the reconstruction effort a central issue is the right thing to do, because we have a moral obligation to help Americans whose communities have been destroyed rebuild. But it also is good politics, because it represents something much broader -- the idea of community itself.

Two Anniversaries

This September marks the fifth anniversary of the terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's strike on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

After five years of telling us that our invasion of Iraq was intimately linked to combating the 9/11 aggressors, President Bush is now trying to distract us from the war he began there. Practical progressives cannot allow themselves, however, to be distracted; this disastrous war is the most important issue facing our nation today and is inextricably linked to all of the other challenges we face as a national community.

All of the rationales offered for our involvement in Iraq have proven spurious. Before our invasion, Iraq was not a haven for terrorists, as we were urged to believe. Everyone now acknowledges this.

Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, as we were urged to believe. Everyone now acknowledges this, too.

We have not been "welcomed with open arms as liberators," as we were urged to expect. Everyone now acknowledges this.

Our invasion has not fostered and will not foster a new democratic order in the Middle East, as we were promised. Those who do not acknowledge this are deluding themselves.

The direct financial cost of the Iraq war to our national treasury now exceeds $330 billion, according to the National Priorities Project (see the link at the top of the page; for a motivator, make it your home page!) Of course, the human cost is incalculable, as is the cost in lost prestige, power, respect and goodwill abroad.

We must get out. Our ill-advised invasion and attempt at building a democratic Iraq is doomed to failure; the best we can hope for is to minimize our losses and leave the region with one or two islands of stability in a partitioned Iraq.

These two anniversaries -- 9/11 and Katrina -- are inextricably connected. If our disastrous, nonsensical, and ineffective response to 9/11 represents our national failure, our nation's non-response to Katrina represents our national disgrace. The immediate failures last September were a travesty, and the travesty continues. Hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced and helpless, cities remain devastated, communities destroyed or struggling.

Our own people need our help. An entire region of our nation is striving, alone, to recover from an epic natural disaster. Our resources, our national energy, and our attention pour into a bottomless abyss in Iraq.

The reconstruction of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, not a fool's errand in the Middle East, should be the grand project of our time.

Julie, Ryan, and Me