[Mb-civic] First Step? Admit There's a Problem - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

First Step? Admit There's a Problem

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, August 26, 2005; Page A21

SYDNEY -- History repeats itself in strange ways. Consider two statements.

"A slogan like 'stay the course' is unacceptable."

And: "Stay the course is not a policy."

The first quotation goes back to October 1982, when a Republican 
candidate for governor of New York named Lewis Lehrman complained about 
his party's national slogan during that year's midterm elections. Stay 
the course, insisted Lehrman, who eventually lost narrowly to Democrat 
Mario Cuomo, was a lousy theme in the face of a 10 percent national 
unemployment rate.

The second quotation is of more recent, though still Republican, 
coinage. Last Sunday, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska laid into the Bush 
administration's policy in Iraq. Hagel insisted that remaining in Iraq 
over an extended period -- staying the course -- "would bog us down, it 
would further destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more 
influence."

President Bush continues to insist, at least in public, on doing what 
he's doing. "We will stay, we will fight and we will win the war on 
terror," Bush said in Idaho on Wednesday. But staying and fighting in 
Iraq looks increasingly antithetical to winning the war on terrorism. 
What is a superpower whose power has been dissipated by a deeply flawed 
policy to do?

There was an electrifying moment here last week when a longtime friend 
of the United States spoke up during a meeting of the Australian 
American Leadership Dialogue, a group I've been part of for several 
years. Kim Beazley, the leader of the Australian Labor Party and a 
former defense minister, proposed an alternative that would admit the 
errors of the past by way of salvaging America's influence for the future.

Beazley, who elaborated on his off-the record address in an interview, 
argued that the war in Iraq, like the Vietnam War 35 years ago, was 
"sucking the oxygen out of American foreign policy." The United States, 
he said, needed to engage in "a phased extraction" from Iraq while 
bolstering the war on terrorism elsewhere. He used the unlikely role 
model of Richard Nixon, who gradually withdrew American forces from 
Vietnam while engaging China and forcing the Soviet Union into arms 
negotiations.

Beazley's metaphor was an arresting way of showing how mistakes in Iraq 
need not permanently dent the United States' influence -- provided 
America recognizes its mistakes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/25/AR2005082501615.html
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