The Debate Now 1/13/07

On New Year’s Day, I published an op-ed piece in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on the impact of the Iraq Study Group. At the time, Americans were looking hard for real answers to a tough problem in Iraq. We were looking for compelling ideas and engaged in serious dialogue with one another. We sought creativity, penetrating insight, and real solutions. We were willing to be led well.

Last Wednesday night, President Bush squandered the opportunity to lead America again. Much as he did in the wake of 9/11, the president did not choose a path of dynamic leadership based on thought, reason, and dialogue, but rather a path of ideological purity regardless of the facts. This was his choice, and it has been deeply disturbing at the very base of the American body politic.

Overnight, the dialogue that had emerged from the consensus that Iraq was a real and serious problem changed into a polarized argument for or against his plan. It did not need to be this way. The subtext to the whole debate is the subconscious sense Americans have of a President imprisoned by his own ideology. Rather than a creative strategy to solve the problem in Iraq, the president delivered what amounted to a declaration of his strategy to expand the war beyond Iraq. He threatened Iran and Syria. He lectured the moderate nations in the region, saying that they “must understand” what he wants them to understand. Most Americans don’t talk to our neighbors like that, whether we like them or not; the president’s rhetoric is disturbing.

The tragedy of this episode is that the American people really seek a new way forward. We seek solutions to the problem. We want to discuss new plans, new ideas, new solutions. The president gave us no reason to believe that his new plan is anything but more of the same. Same rhetoric. Same results. A stunning failure of leadership exceeded only by the decision to invade Iraq as part of a counter terror strategy in the wake of 9/11.