Thursday, June 28, 2007
Editorial: Waiting for further word from Warner
The commonwealth's senior senator should have more to say about the surge strategy in Iraq.
From the RoundTable blog
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Virginia's U.S. Sen. John Warner lauded Richard Lugar, his Republican colleague, for publicly breaking ranks with President Bush Tuesday over his Iraq war strategy. Warner's reaction was encouraging.
He would do better, though, to add a strong public statement of his own that would build GOP pressure on the White House to look beyond Bush's "surge" and seek a more realistic disengagement strategy that begins bringing U.S. forces home.
Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has been a loyal Bush supporter. His now-open skepticism about whether the U.S. troop buildup will succeed cannot be dismissed as mere negativity from some mysterious cabal of Bush-haters who want the president to fail -- a favorite canard among diehard Bush supporters.
Lugar and Warner, a highly respected member of the Armed Services Committee, met privately with the president to convey their concerns after he announced the troop surge in January. But the senators have resisted Democratic efforts in Congress to set a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces -- and on Tuesday Lugar made clear his continued opposition to "a precipitous withdrawal."
But he was equally clear in his call for reducing American forces to a support role, and doing it soon rather than waiting until September, when the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is supposed to give Congress a progress report.
Lugar has stepped out of the shadow of the White House and spoken frankly and publicly:
- Bush and his advisers have not yet faced the reality of the situation in Iraq.
- The U.S. military escalation has little chance of success.
- The Iraqi government has been unable to reach political compromises necessary to its long-term viability, such as revising the Iraqi constitution and ensuring an equitable distribution of the country's oil wealth among its competing factions.
- U.S. military forces are stressed.
- U.S. standing in the world is eroded and will slip perhaps irreparably without a change in strategy.
- Deferring a change until fall will harden already drawn partisan lines and destroy hope of developing a truly bipartisan foreign policy, which the nation needs.
Warner praised Lugar's "important and sincere contribution" to the war debate. Virginia's influential senior senator might push the White House to shift course with a similarly frank and public statement of his own.
