Much more surprising than Rep. Steny Hoyer?s easy victory over Rep. John Murtha in the vote for new House Majority Leader was speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi?s suicidal backing of the sure loser.
The prospective speaker said she had endorsed Murtha “because I thought that would be the best way to bring an end to the war in Iraq. I know that he will continue to take the lead on that issue for our caucus, for this Congress, for our country.” She thanked him “for his courage for stepping forward one year ago to speak truth to power, to change the debate in this country in a way that gave us this majority this November.”
But Hoyer was elected for two reasons that had nothing to do with Iraq. First, he earned the post as a tenacious laborer in the party vineyards, both on the House floor as legislative technician and on the campaign stump as speaker and fundraiser.
Second, Murtha offered a sharply undesirable contrast to him ? a gruff, unpolished and undiplomatic hard-nose with a questionable ethical background and open hostility to the reform image Pelosi herself seeks to refurbish for the party.
The notion that Murtha as House Majority Leader would somehow help “bring an end to the war in Iraq” disregarded a critical point ?that a large majority of House Democrats don?t share his view on rapid redeployment of the American presence there.
In fact, the central problem for Pelosi in seeking to bring about and end to the war is that her party is going forward with no firm and definitive position or strategy on accomplishing that result. It is stuck on the generalized proposition that the Bush administration can?t “stay the course” toward what the president calls victory in Iraq.
It would be fanciful to assume that voters on Nov. 7 cast their ballots with anything more than a hope that the Democrats would have the answer to the mess in Iraq. Rather, the Democratic takeover of Congress was the result of a repudiation of Bush as a competent leader and of his going-nowhere policy on the war.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike find themselves looking to the approaching report of the Iraq Study Group created by them to provide some sort of an undetermined life preserver that could, at a minimum, nudge Bush off his course to secure, stabilize and defend the propped-up government in Baghdad.
But until the Democratsthemselves can achieve a more specific and unified party position on how to extricate this country from the mess created by Bush?s wrong-headed radical foreign policy, their voice in the pressing issue of the day will remain essentially an anti-Bush harangue.
One frequent Democratic argument for drawing down the American presence in Iraq ? putting greater pressure on the Iraqis themselves to accept responsibility for their own security ? found a perhaps unwitting ally the other day in the testimony of Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. forces there, before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Abizaid, while contending the U.S. force level was about right now, conceded that as long as the Iraqis looked to the American occupiers for their security they were unlikely to do the job themselves. He suggested intensified security training by U.S. forces as the answer, but pointedly rejected the argument of Republican Sen. John McCain that more American troops are required if the war in Iraq is to be won.
Abizaid also said coalition and Iraqi forces had only about four months to turn the security situation around ? a statement obviously favorable to the Democrats? insistence that a sharp shift in policy direction is necessary.
The prospective Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, told reporters the next day the war “is not going to be won militarily, it will be won diplomatically.” He and Sen. Carl Levin, soon to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee, have urged Bush to call for a regional conference with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria to find a way out.
That idea would be at least a start in putting more substance to the Democrats? heretofore vague call for a new direction on Iraq.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
