Longtime Bush administration supporter Sen. Richard Luger (R-IN) gave a speech on the Senate floor yesterday in which he called for the Bush administration to change their Iraq strategy so that it meets up with U.S. interests. Luger warned his colleagues, “Unless we recalibrate our strategy in Iraq to fit our domestic political conditions and the broader needs of U.S. national security, we risk foreign policy failures that could greatly diminish our influence in the region and the world. The current debate on Iraq in Washington has not been conducive to a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy.”
He continued,”Our debate is being driven by partisan political calculations and understandable fatigue with bad news — including deaths and injuries to Americans… I would observe that none of this debate addresses our vital interests any more than they are addressed by an unquestioned devotion to an ill-defined strategy of “staying the course” in Iraq.” Luger went on to call the current administration policy unsustainable. He said, “In my judgment, the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved. Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”
He also suggested that, “We should attempt to preserve initiatives that have shown promise, such as engaging Sunni groups that are disaffected with the extreme tactics and agenda of Al Qaeda in Iraq. But three factors – the political fragmentation in Iraq, the growing stress on our military, and the constraints of our own domestic political process — are converging to make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame.”
In Luger’s view, most Iraqis don’t want to be Iraqis. “Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis. We may bemoan this, but it is not a surprising phenomenon. The behavior of most Iraqis is governed by calculations related to their history, their personal safety, their basic economic existence, and their tribal or sectarian loyalties. These are primal forces that have constrained the vision of most ordinary Iraqis to the limits of their neighborhoods and villages.”
I expect most of us are so tired of getting our hopes up that some Republican Congressmen will finally wake up to the absurdaties of the Bush Administration’s non-policies about Iraq, that this one flew right on by us. But it’s different. The dialogue about Iraq is monotonous. Bush’s tired slogans from the past [Stay the Course] and Cheney’s paranoid delusions sound like dead leaves blowing on the garden path. Even the Democrats who rale against the Administration’s meaningless words don’t talk about the Iraqi people. I don’t recall that the Iraq Study Group even talked about their perspective. Luger, in a couple of sentences, captures an essence that sounds authentic – "Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis."
What a fine, thoughful guy. I’m not going to join the Republican Party tomorrow, but my hat’s off to Richard Luger [R-Indiana] – a truthsayer. So, Richard, how about talking to some of your friends on that side of the aisle about saying what they feel, rather than what the soon-to-be-forgotten White House sends down for them to support? There may be a middle after all.
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