Partisan bickering won't end the war
How can Americans lecture Iraqis about 'reconciliation' when we can't even manage it at home?
Not for the first time, self-awareness was in short supply across Washington during this week's marathon congressional hearings on Iraq with Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
The one point that drew agreement from Republicans and Democrats alike was that Iraq's political leaders have too often failed to transcend their narrow sectarian interests to forge compromises in the national interest.
Pot, meet kettle.
Here in the U.S., the two parties are doing much the same thing. President Bush and congressional Democrats are each so determined to win the argument over Iraq that they have lost sight of their joint interest in finding a way forward that can attract broad and lasting support from a public disillusioned and dangerously polarized over the war. More than ever, the parties this week structured the debate as if it were an electoral campaign. Each asked Americans to ponder only the pieces of the picture most congenial to its arguments.
Democrats, challenging Petraeus' numbers on the overall trends in violence, downplayed the evidence that the "surge" has improved security where it has been applied -- and, if nothing else, has prevented a downward spiral into full-scale civil war.
The White House and congressional Republicans, celebrating those intermittent security gains, brushed aside the National Intelligence Estimate and the report from the Government Accountability Office documenting the Iraqi government's inability to provide basic services, the continuing doubts about the loyalty and reliability of the Iraqi security forces, and the absence of progress toward the political reconciliation that all sides consider the key to long-term stabilization in Iraq. Petraeus and Crocker, while not ignoring those problems, unduly minimized them too.
Interest groups on the left and right, meanwhile, are doing their best to discourage anyone from bridging this partisan gulf. Conservatives have fired repeated warning shots at Republicans wavering on the war. Freedom's Watch, a new conservative group, is targeting Republican, not Democratic, members of Congress in most of its multimillion-dollar ad campaign urging support for Bush's strategy. And Republicans have surely noticed that both GOP House members most critical of the conflict (Maryland's Wayne Gilchrest and North Carolina's Walter Jones) have already drawn primary challenges from war supporters. (So had Nebraska's Chuck Hagel, the most skeptical GOP senator, before he announced Monday that he was retiring.)
