Talking to different people today I heard many different
opinions about just what policy the president had enunciated in his speech.
After reading the speech several times it seemed to me that when you peeled away
the Cheney-esque bluster you had a Powell-esque policy.
No one is mentioning this. The White House had one policy. They hit a brick
wall. Now they’ve changed policies.
And that’s good. Because this is a better policy.
Meanwhile, The New Republic has a scathing
editorial in its new issue, which strikes me as completely half right. The
magazine argues that the Democrats are shirking their responsibility by ducking
the basic questions about what to do about Iraq and in essence failing to
embrace the president’s historic policy of preemption and regime change. The
first part of that is true, I think. The second part strikes me as strained and
unpersuasive.
(In the Cold War, guys, containment was the historic policy, not
roll-back. The logic of containment doesn’t apply to Iraq today. But bold does not always mean
right. Nor is maximum assertiveness always a sign of clarity or logic.)
I believe the Democrats are missing an opportunity. The opportunity, though,
is not to play Vandenbergs to Bush’s
Truman, but to hash out an aggressive
policy on Iraq which eschews the dishonesty and amateurism which has plagued
White House policy for months. They are missing that opportunity. And for that
alone the TNR editorial is worth considering.
