Washington
Two senators – rivals, each hoping to be president – have set different moral and political courses as they contemplate the endgame in Iraq.
Sen. John Kerry has no choice, really.
Three decades ago, just back from the war in Vietnam, he posed a famous question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Kerry has concluded that the American occupation of Iraq is just such a blunder, and now the question haunts him.
“When you stand at the Vietnam Wall, you can’t help but see that half the names were added after American leaders knew our strategy would not work,” Kerry says.
“It was immoral then, and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.”
If the Iraqis can’t form a government by mid-May, says Kerry, American troops should start coming home. And even if the Iraqis succeed, he says, we should redeploy to elsewhere in the region by the end of the year.
Kerry has been tossed and torn by Iraq. He voted against the first Gulf War, then embraced the American victory. He supported calls for regime change in Iraq, and voted for U.S. intervention, then turned against it. His inconstancy may have cost him the presidency in 2004.
Kerry’s position is just his latest bow to “the political winds,” said Sen. Wayne Allard, in a critique of his colleague earlier this month that brought the Massachusetts senator storming back to the Senate floor.
“Let me ask the senator from Colorado,” said an angry Kerry. “Is it OK by him that young Americans are dying right now while politicians in Baghdad are frittering away the time and the opportunity that our soldiers fought to give them?
“They only respond to deadlines,” Kerry said of the Iraqis. “We ought to have a deadline now to tell them: ‘Don’t put our kids’ lives at stake.”‘
Sen. Joe Biden has taken a cooler and more calculating tack. He was elected to the Senate in 1972 and has specialized in foreign relations. Like Kerry, Biden wants to be president. Like Kerry, the Delaware Democrat is convinced that President Bush has bungled the war.
“Bush lost this,” Biden says.
“We’ve given him everything he has asked for,” says Biden, but the administration’s “arrogance” and “incompetence” has left the U.S. needing “a three-point shot at the buzzer from somewhere between the top of the key and half-court” to salvage something in Iraq.
Bush stays the course with the zeal of a reformed drinker, says Biden. In conversations at the White House, Biden is struck by how often Bush cites his “instincts” and “draws a real inner strength from his ability to stand alone.”
It is the certitude, Biden says, of a drinker who had “an epiphany” and quit the booze cold turkey. “I have alcoholics in my family. There is a strong sense of conviction from being able to beat it.”
As the situation in Iraq deteriorates, says Biden, it becomes more likely that the Republicans will pay a price in the mid-term elections next November.
“This is Bush’s war,” he says.
But if Democrats raise a hue and cry, fuel a peace movement and try to force a premature withdrawal, they will give “Bush … and Karl Rove the ability to say: ‘If not for them we would have won.”‘
So Biden counsels moderation, shuns deadlines, and spends his time “trying to keep my party from giving Bush an excuse for why we failed.”
The American political system is designed to correct itself via elections. It’s the right – indeed, the duty – of the opposition party to play smart enough to win.
As Biden sees it, it would be politically stupid and morally unjustified for Democrats to take a feel-good, anti-war position that results in leaving the war’s Republican architects with unchecked power.
Morality, in this case, requires victory.
That’s “politics,” Biden says.
But while Biden is of the Vietnam generation, he is not a Vietnam veteran. Kerry saw combat there, saw good friends die, and can’t make the tradeoff.
“I’m not going to be a United States senator who adds to the next Wall,” he says, “so that once again people will point to a bunch of names added after we knew something was wrong.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on past columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington).
