Enough talk already. Enough

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Enough talk already. Enough excuses and mumbo-jumbo. Our situation in Iraq is bad. But our situation in Washington is worse.

Despite what some people are saying, I really don’t think the situation in Iraq is irretrievable. Frankly, we can’t allow it to be irretrievable because the consequences of failure are too dark to imagine. But it’s only retrievable if the people in the driver’s seat can shake themselves free of wishful thinking and ideologically-rooted assumptions and have the courage to reevaluate the situation and make some course corrections.

I hesitate to throw wisdom after foolishness. But Lincoln captured some of what’s necessary when he said: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present … As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

But look what we’re getting.

In an article about the recent reverses in the Middle East, Ken Adelman told the Post: “We should not try to convince people that things are getting better. Rather, we should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism.” Richard Perle said: “It may be a very long time before we’ve so substantially eliminated the source of terror that we can pronounce that we are safe.”

The logic of these comments and others from administration-connected hawks is that the president should stop telling the public that things are getting better. Things really are as bad as they look in Iraq. But that’s because we’re in an all-out global war against the terrorists.

Rather than these guys disenthralling themselves, they’re yet again trying to bend logic and chronology into a metaphysical pretzel in which the failure of the policy becomes the justification for the policy.

I was briefly heartened when it seemed that we were — or rather Colin Powell was — trying to use the bombing as an opportunity to revisit the issue of the UN’s involvement. I was a lot less heartened when I heard this exchange Thursday evening between Paula Zahn and Dick Holbrooke …

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: I’m now also joined by Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to help us better understand what took place at the U.N. today.
Not a very good day for Colin Powell, was it?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UNITED NATIONS: Not a good day for the United States.

I think Bill Cohen, my former Cabinet colleague, put it exactly right when he said that we need to try to bring the international community in. And that means a little flexibility for the U.N. What Colin Powell did today at the U.N. was come to New York and offer the same resolution, essentially, that we’d offered two weeks ago and portray it as a tribute to the fallen and great and brave Sergio Vieira de Mello and the other U.N. people.

This created a very, very unfortunate attitude at the U.N. among other nation states.

ZAHN: How so?

HOLBROOKE: Including many countries that want to help us.

Well, they were offended by it. Now, what is the answer to this? As Bill Cohen just said to you, we need to internationalize the effort. We have to. We are not going to defend the U.N. people. The U.N. was playing an indispensable role in support of American foreign policy. Sergio Vieira de Mello was a Brazilian working for the U.N., but everything he did, working closely with Jerry Bremer in Baghdad, was in support of the U.S.

And the attack on the U.N. was an attack on the U.S., because they only went after that building because it was a softer target. Those people are now going to be targets again. They can’t be left unprotected. The U.S. cannot add the additional burden of protecting them. So, as Bill Cohen just told you, we need international force.

In order to get that, the U.S. is going to have to make a deal, an easy deal, a deal that any diplomat can make with some of the other countries. We should encourage Kofi Annan and his colleagues to create a resolution in the Security Council which creates a U.N. protective force for itself that operates as a separate command within the overall American umbrella.

Secretary Powell said today at the U.N. that this would violate the unity-of-command principle. With all due respect to a great American hero who was a soldier, I don’t understand that. We have violated that principle in Afghanistan already, with NATO on one side and the U.S. on the other. We can do it in Iraq. And we need to do something fast. And I hope, by next week, we will have a better resolution.

In Iraq yesterday, John McCain also spoke about the need to take a fresh, unvarnished view of the situation: “After an event like this [the U.N. bombing], we have to evaluate whether we have enough people, whether we have the right kind of people and whether we are spending enough money, and I think it’s appropriate to make that evaluation.”

Quite right.

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