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February 15, 2007

House Iraq Debate Reveals Political Divide

By Daniel Henninger

It's not likely that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain or Rudy Giuliani took time this week from the rigors of presidential trajectory to watch the House floor debate on Iraq. Too bad. They would have learned something useful.

Whatever its gerrymandered imperfections, the Founders' "house of the people" is born biannually from 435 congressional districts. The House leadership scheduled time for debate on the Democrats' famous "97-word" resolution unto midnight on Tuesday and Wednesday and into evening today, with a vote scheduled for tonight or tomorrow.

That debate--seen mainly by beat reporters and C-Span's hyperpartisans--spread before us a political inkblot on Iraq and the war on terror that is at least as accurate as the opinion polls that substitute for actual views of the electorate. Each member stood amid the chamber's polished wood and gave the nation the sum of his or her political calculation and personal belief.

The most striking impression from the debate is the most obvious: The nation is polarized. Of what I saw, there was no common ground between the two parties, none. Mainly, it was Blue America (Massachusetts, New York, cities, blue California) versus Red America (Florida, Texas, suburbs, red California).

The conventional wisdom now is that the "independent" vote is ascendant. But if Iraq is hot next year, the presidential runners will have to turn the trick of surviving the cauldrons of their boiling blue and red primaries and then purporting in the general election that they've emerged from them a lovely, independent pink. On foreign policy, that won't be easy, especially for Hillary and Barack.

Both need to find a worldview somewhere, because their party doesn't have one that extends beyond the suburbs of Baghdad.

In the House debate, it was the calculation of Speaker Pelosi and her leadership to keep the focus on the poll-proven unpopularity of the Iraq war and the 21st century's most famous bogeyman, "George Bush." The GOP calculation was to move the debate off Iraq and onto the broader war on terror.

Politics aside, the result on public view was a Democratic side that looked small, mired in talk of American "failure," while a number of senior Republicans--John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, even Peter King--produced almost stirring speeches on the substance and meaning of the global threat.

Pete Hoekstra, recently chairman of the intelligence committee, gave what must be the severest attack on radical Islam ever by a U.S. public figure. Forget Pope Benedict; there was nary a genuflection to Muslim sensibilities in Mr. Hoekstra's argument that the enemy is not some vague thing called terrorism: "We are not at war with a tactic. We are at war with a group of militant Islamists who hate us and who hate much of the rest of the world."

John Boehner reviewed each Islamic terrorist act directed at the U.S. dating to the Iran hostage-taking of 1979. "Too bad it took so long to open our eyes," he said, "but they are open now." Ileana Ros-Lehtinen quoted the famous blueprint of al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri: "The first stage: expel the Americans from Iraq." Rep. Charles Boustany said plausibly that other Arab nations could never help with a political settlement if the region is engulfed in violence after a U.S. exit.

So one may ask: Where were you guys when we needed you? Republicans lost the election because most of them foxholed the past two years when the going got tough. Instead of this Kissingerian geopolitical vision, they let one guy carry the burden (they would reply that the "one guy" never asked for their help).

Sens. Clinton and Obama should take a long look at Tuesday's videotape of the Democratic House now shaping the party's foreign policy. Is this where they'll want to be next year?

Even allowing for the politics of the Iraq-only script, it got a little weird watching speaker after speaker (excepting freshman and former Navy admiral Joe Sestak) pretend that the world and all its troubles can be telescoped down to the Sunni Triangle. Rep. Tom Lantos, chairman of the foreign affairs committee and nominally responsible for a larger view, simply wrote off Iraq's government--"They have made minimal and cosmetic efforts"--and the entire Iraqi people: "Iraqis themselves don't seem to want it."

The more difficult political problem, though, is still Vietnam. All the while the Democratic members were withdrawing support for the U.S. commitment in Iraq, they were at pains to inoculate themselves against their toxic experience with Vietnam. So horrifying are the famous images in the 1970s of what presumably were not evangelicals spitting on GIs coming home from Vietnam, that House Democrats, with every second intake of breath, spoke of the troops and their families ("their wonderful families"--Rep. Ike Skelton). History may view this as progress.

Then there is the matter of the also-famous 1975 decision to withhold appropriations for the war in Vietnam. Democrats insist they won't pull the plug on the troops in Iraq, preferring what they call, with no apparent irony, a "fully funded withdrawal." Still, several invoked the "power of the purse" (Messrs. Conyers and McGovern), referring to next month's vote on an appropriations supplemental. And Rep. Jim McDermott said he'd duplicate the 1971 Hatfield-McGovern amendment to bring the troops home.

It will be the job of Speaker Pelosi and candidates Clinton and Obama to convince the wider world that these hell-no, we'll-never-go compulsions aren't simply bred into the party's genetic code after 30 years. Starting with why so many House Democrats, led by Ms. Pelosi, called the Bush surge an "escalation," from the hallowed anti-Vietnam lexicon.

The debate offered the inevitable amusements of politicians in full throat. Both sides (Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York on the left, Pete Sessions of Texas on the right) claimed that the Iraq Study Group proved their positions, driving the final stake into the corpse of "bipartisanship." Colin Powell and Gen. John Abizaid were raised up more than once as heroes of the Democratic opposition (still not too late to disown the honor). And after the House chamber had filled with learned references to Robert Frost, Douglas MacArthur and John Stuart Mill, came Rep. Jim Pascrell (D., N.J.) that "Iranians are ethnically of Indo-European descent; their language is similar in structure to classical Latin." Over this, I believe, there was bipartisan head-scratching.

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