WASHINGTON - While Republicans voice
growing unease over US President George W Bush's
vow to "stay the course" in Iraq, Democrats remain
deeply divided about their position on a conflict
that most of them privately describe as a major
foreign policy disaster.
Despite the
plunging popularity of the war - and of
Bush's approval ratings - leading Democrats,
particularly the party's brahmins in the Senate,
have so far refused to countenance talk of
withdrawal, preferring instead to attack the
president over tactical issues rather than the war
itself.
But their reticence - no doubt
inspired by their fear of being depicted as soft
on terrorism and the memory of their disastrous
Vietnam War-era splits between hawks and doves in
the late 1960s and early 1970s - is appearing
increasingly untenable as
the
party's grass-roots activists enlist in what is
becoming, thanks to the mother of one fallen
soldier, a serious, new antiwar movement, and as
prominent Republicans themselves demonstrate a
growing willingness to question the war.
"We should start figuring out how we get
out of there," Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a
highly decorated Vietnam War veteran with
presidential ambitions, told a national
public-affairs television program on Sunday.
"I think our involvement [in Iraq] has
destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we
stay there, I think the further destabilization
will occur," he said, comparing the present
conflict's similarity to the Vietnam War.
"What I think the White House does not yet
understand - and some of my colleagues - the dam
has broke [sic] on this policy. The longer we stay
there, the more similarities [with Vietnam] are
going to come together."
Hagel's remarks
came as a new spate of polls found that public
opinion against the war has strengthened over the
summer. Bush's approval ratings have fallen to
their lowest level ever - between 36% and 40% -
amid strong indications that his performance on
Iraq is the main culprit.
Bush's job
approval ratings are at their lowest point of his
presidency as only 40% of US adults have a
favorable opinion of his performance and 58% have
a negative opinion, according to a Harris
Interactive poll. This is a decline from two
months ago, when the president's ratings were 45%
positive and 55% negative.
Other recent
surveys have found that majorities now see the
decision to go to war as a mistake and favor
either an immediate or gradual withdrawal.
While one would think that Hagel's public
concerns and Bush's sinking poll numbers - as well
as the surprising near-victory by a strongly
antiwar Iraq veteran in a recent election in a
solidly Republican Congressional district in Ohio
- would give leading Democrats the political
confidence to stake out a more aggressive position
on the war, that has not turned out to be the
case.
While about half of the Democratic
caucus in the House of Representatives - the
chamber considered closest to the grass-roots -
voted in May for a resolution requiring the
president to formulate an exit strategy for Iraq,
the party's Senate leaders have refused even to
table such an initiative.
So far, only one
likely 2008 presidential candidate, Senator
Russell Feingold, has called for a complete
withdrawal - by January 1, 2007 - although, in a
television interview on Sunday, he stressed that
the date should considered a target rather than a
deadline.
On the other hand, five of the
party's most prominent leaders - 2004 presidential
candidate Senator John Kerry, Senate Minority
Leader Harry Reid, Senator Joseph Biden, Senator
Evan Bayh and Senator Hillary Clinton - have not
only opposed setting a date for withdrawal, but
have also, at various times, supported
substantially increasing the number of troops in
Iraq, as well as the size of the US Army and
Marine Corps. The last three are all considered by
the party establishment as strong presidential
candidates.
"If we were to artificially
set a deadline of some sort, that would be like
giving a green light to the terrorists, and we
can't afford to do that," Clinton, whose
ex-president husband Bill has also refused to
publicly criticize the war, noted in February.
Biden, who as ranking member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, serves as the
Democrats' chief foreign-policy spokesman, warned
earlier this summer, "We cannot afford to lose."
Even the party's chairman, former antiwar
candidate Howard Dean, has been mute on the issue.
Unlike Feingold, all five Democratic
leaders also voted in October 2002 to give Bush
the authorization to go to war, a fact that may
make it far more difficult for them to call for a
pullout, lest they be accused, like Kerry during
the 2004 campaign, by Republicans of
"flip-flopping" on a vital national-security
issue.
They are also clearly haunted by
what happened to the party during the Vietnam era
when a split between hawks and doves paved the way
for Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 and his
landslide 1972 defeat of George McGovern, whose
straightforwardly antiwar stance has been
repeatedly caricatured by Republicans to label the
Democrats as soft on national security.
Indeed, some top Democratic advisers,
including Clinton's savvy former communications
chief Michael McCurry, insist that Democrats
should indeed be very careful in criticizing Bush.
"Credit the Democrats for not trying to
pour more gasoline on the fire, even if they're
not particularly unified in their message,"
McCurry told the Washington Post this week. "The
smartest thing for Democrats to do is be
supportive."
McCurry's position is also
consistent with much of the party's foreign-policy
establishment, such as former UN ambassador
Richard Holbrooke and secretary of state Madeleine
Albright, and key advisers situated at
think-tanks, such as the Brookings Institution.
As noted in a recent article by The Nation
magazine's Ari Berman, this "strategic class" is
dominated by "national-security Democrats" who
generally supported the war in Iraq even as they
criticized Bush for taking such a unilateralist
position.
At the same time, however, the
refusal of top Democrats to reassess their
position is spurring growing frustration and even
anger, both among grass-roots Democrats who have
been emboldened both by the polls and by the way
that Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a dead
US Marine who camped out most of this month
outside Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch, has put the
president on the defensive, and by some prominent
unelected leaders and funders.
Indeed,
former senator Gary Hart, a long-time national
security honcho whose 1988 front-runner
presidential candidacy was derailed by an
extra-marital affair, charged Wednesday in a
Washington Post column entitled "Who Will Say 'No
More'?" that leading Democrats were "cowardly" for
remaining silent in what he called "a moral
crisis".
"No Democrat, especially one now
silent, should expect election by default," he
wrote. "The public trust must be earned and
speaking clearly, candidly and forcefully now
about the mess in Iraq is the place to begin," he
argued, challenging Democratic leaders who
supported the war to say, "I made a mistake ...".
That is increasingly the message of the
activist wing of the party, which worries that a
disillusioned electorate will punish Democrats for
leaving the initiative to Bush in hopes that it
will all turn sour.
"You can play the game
of letting Bush debate with himself for so long,"
Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, a
political action committee, told the Los Angeles
Times. "In a political sense, having Bush alone on
the stage may help, but in the sense of actually
resolving this problem, I don't see that it does."
