When 'thoughtful' is unthoughtful: Sen. Richard Lugar and the disastrous 'middle way' on Iraq.

IF you are a Republican, there is no ticket to being considered thoughtful quite like dissenting from President Bush's Iraq policy. Few senators stand to be as "thoughtful" in this sense in the September debate over Iraq as the six-term Indiana Republican Richard Lugar.

Not that getting such credit will be Lugar's motivation. Everyone--even those who doubt his vaunted foreign-policy acumen--credits Dick Lugar's sincerity. He doesn't lord his supposed intellectual superiority over others--as Chuck Hagel does. He is not putting political considerations over the national interest--as so many Democrats do. He's not a puffed-up parody of a senator--like John Warner or Joe Biden.

Lugar is one of those people who were "born old," and it's possible to imagine him burnishing his Council on Foreign Relations credentials back as an Eagle Scout in Indianapolis in the 1940s. He didn't come to Washington as a firebrand who mellowed out into a compromising elder statesman, but has been a compromising elder statesman ever since he was elected in 1976.

So when Lugar dissented from the Bush administration in a June speech, calling for a middle way between a pullout and the surge, it was Lugar being Lugar. Which is harmless enough in most circumstances, but has potentially dire consequences in the midst of a politically contentious shooting war in which maintaining domestic support is crucial.

Fellow Republicans aren't necessarily going to follow Lugar in September, since, a shy man, he tends to be a legislative lone wolf. His fellow elder statesman (and co-sponsor on an Iraq compromise bill), John Warner, is much more likely to try to line up Democrats and fellow Republicans on legislation. But as the reaction to Lugar's June speech shows, his middle-ground position will make him the conscience of the Senate Republican conference among Democrats and in the media.

After the speech, Harry Reid said, "When the history books are written--and they will be written--I believe that Senator Lugar's words yesterday could be remembered as a turning point in this intractable civil war in Iraq." Post-speech, the ordinarily low-profile Lugar appeared on NPR, The Today Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN's Late Edition, Face the Nation, Charlie Rose, and--after another version of the speech in July--This Week with George Stephanopoulos. In one question, Charlie Rose told Lugar, "You watched this carefully--way back, I assume, since you were a Rhodes Scholar, you have been looking at foreign policy and thinking about, you know, a global world."

Lugar is routinely accorded such praise, for no obvious reasons related to his accomplishments. He is most associated with the Nunn-Lugar law to destroy old Soviet nuclear materiel, a worthy program that Lugar obsesses over as if it were his most noteworthy legacy--which it almost certainly will be. He didn't achieve much during his recent chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at least not compared with the reforms in State Department and U.N. programs shepherded into law by his predecessor, Jesse Helms. Lugar nonetheless has ascended to the status of foreign-policy giant. What was once said of the TV interviewer David Frost might be applied to Dick Lugar: "He has risen without a trace."

MIDDLE WAYS AND WRONG WAYS

Lugar's reputation depends largely on how he embodies the tendency in Washington--especially in the Senate--to believe that all problems are solvable by compromise. The people who hold this view tend to consider themselves cosmopolitans, but they are guilty of their own kind of parochialism, believing that what happens around a conference table in Washington is the most important thing in the world. Sometimes, it is. And sometimes the middle way is the most sensible. But not on the Iraq War.

Lugar's middle way in June was taken as a sign of his maturity of judgment and realism, but it was really an analytical embarrassment. A stew of cliches, just-so stories, and wishful thinking, the speech is an inadvertent indictment of the foreign-policy establishment to the extent that Lugar represents it.

It is hard to disagree with Lugar's description of key constraints in the Iraq War as set out in his speech, which his office says still represents his thinking. He said that political progress in Baghdad has been disappointing and that there isn't much cause for optimism in the near term on that front; that the war is a stress on our military; and that domestic political considerations limit the administration's options in Iraq. All this is true, indeed mind-numbingly conventional. What to do about it?

Lugar called for a redeployment of U.S. forces and noted, "Numerous locations for temporary or permanent military bases have been suggested, including Kuwait or other nearby states, the Kurdish territories, or defensible locations in Iraq outside of urban areas." Obviously, a counterinsurgency war of the sort we are waging now could not be fought from those locations.

Lugar is therefore advocating the end of the war as we know it. There would be no strategic reason to keep an enormous contingent of tens of thousands of American troops, pulled from combat patrols, in Iraq or the region if they weren't going to fight. They might as well be removed to Okinawa, as John Murtha once advocated, or simply come home. Lugar's talk of putting them in bases in Iraq or elsewhere is just a way to call his proposal "redeployment" rather than outright "withdrawal."

He is less forthright than other Bush critics who say the war is lost and hopeless--which at least makes their strategy of withdrawal logical. Why fight a war that is lost? Lugar professes to be above such concepts: "We risk becoming fixated on artificial notions of achieving victory or avoiding defeat, when these ill-defined concepts have little relevance to our operations in Iraq."

Lugar's middle way itself depends on ill-defined concepts with little relevance to Iraq. Would we be better off if we had taken Lugar's advice and already short-circuited the surge? To ask the question is almost to answer it. The turn of the Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda--facilitated by our counterinsurgency operations--would be in jeopardy, as would the progress we've made in diminishing sectarian killings in Baghdad, which has been dependent on our intensive neighborhood-to-neighborhood patrolling.

Lugar posits that under his redeployment we would continue training Iraqi troops and delivering economic assistance, but "end the U.S. attempt to interpose ourselves between Iraqi sectarian factions." It would be wonderful--and awfully convenient to politicians here at home--if we could continue efforts that enjoy a broad consensus in the U.S. (training and economic assistance) while discontinuing the effort that doesn't (policing a civil war). But the dynamics in Iraq don't allow it.

If we were to permit the civil war again to burn out of control, the Iraqi army would dissolve into more of a sectarian force even than it is now, no matter how much training we were doing (and some of the best training is joint combat operations with the Iraqis). As for economic assistance, a vicious insurgency and a civil war would very likely mean it had been wasted--as we have learned to our grief over the last four years.

Besides, there are sound strategic reasons to "interpose" ourselves in the civil war. Lugar himself says "we have an interest in preventing the disorder and sectarian violence in Iraq from upsetting wider regional stability," and lists a parade of horribles that would follow if we didn't: the fall of friendly governments in the region, interrupted oil flows, huge refugee exoduses. The most direct way to prevent an Iraqi civil war from having these strategic consequences is to tamp it down at its source, in Iraq.

Constraining the civil war is also integral to the fight against al-Qaeda, which Lugar expresses an interest--in theory--in continuing in Iraq. In seeking to stoke a civil war in Iraq, al-Qaeda has not only indulged the Sunni-extremist hatred for the Shiites, but pursued a classic insurgency strategy. Insurgents often engage in provocations in order to prompt an overreaction from their adversaries that will drive more people into their arms--e.g., the Samarra bombing that almost tore Iraq apart.

Ahot civil war serves to undermine the credibility of the central government by accentuating its sectarian aspect. And by prompting retaliation from the Shiites, sectarian violence pushes Sunnis toward the extremists for protection, and for vengeance in turn. It is in these conditions that al-Qaeda can thrive, and this is why it has consistently worked to provoke civil war. Lugar wants to cede al-Qaeda one of its key strategic objectives.

Lugar despairs of political progress in Iraq. "Sectarian factionalism will not abate anytime soon," he said in June, "and probably cannot be controlled from the top." He appears to be right about that, at least for the moment. Thus, we have been attempting to control it from the bottom, working from neighborhood to neighborhood and from tribe to tribe. This has met with success, reducing sectarian killings in Baghdad and eroding mainstream Sunni support for al-Qaeda, the author of most of the sectarian suicide bombings.

Lugar falls into the trap of making a fetish of the benchmarks for political progress that were formulated back in January. It is important to recall their purpose. They were ultimately considered a means to draw Sunnis away from the insurgency and to our side. The benchmarks have not been met, but the Sunnis have come our way anyway--in itself a momentous piece of political progress.

This progress shouldn't be underestimated simply because it came about in a way we didn't envision. National legislation aimed at sectarian reconciliation is still important, but if we care about political progress in Iraq it would be foolish to abandon the robust military involvement that is our main leverage over both the Shiites and the Sunnis. As soon as it is clear that we are leaving--whether to Kuwait, Kurdistan, or bases within Iraq--our political leverage will diminish considerably and the men with guns will move to fill the vacuum.

Incredibly, Lugar not only fails to account for this, he believes we will be able to fine-tune the Iraqi political system after a redeployment. He said on Charlie Rose that after a redeployment "we have some hopes of really working the Iraqi problem out--its business aspects, its political aspects, the corruption aspects which siphon off much of the oil that is not going anywhere, including the treasury of the government of Iraq." This is an ambitious agenda even when we have 160,000 troops in Iraq keeping a lid on the place; in their absence, it's an absurd fantasy.

Similarly, Lugar believes that we can maintain--and even increase--our diplomatic leverage even as we redeploy. As if our diplomatic standing wouldn't be affected by a deterioration in security conditions that everyone--with perhaps the exception of certain Washington elder statesmen--would consider an American defeat.

"A diplomatic offensive," Lugar said in June, "is likely to be easier in the context of a tactical drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq." This drawdown, Lugar argues, would increase the chances of diplomatic and economic aid to Iraq from the Europeans and from multilateral organizations "who have sought to limit their association with an unpopular war." Would the war really become more popular after even the U.S.--which had so much invested in it--had effectively abandoned Iraq to chaos and civil war?

COME ONE, COME ALL

Neocons have been accused of putting too much faith in military force to effect changes in political culture. Lugar places the same sort of faith in his proposed diplomatic forum open to all countries in the region, including Syria and Iran. It would be a means, he explained in his July follow-on speech, of achieving "transparency" in a region beset by "conspiracy theories, corruption, and the opaque policies of non-democratic governments." Actually, in such an environment, a diplomatic forum is more likely to be an occasion for crowd-pleasing posturing and lies. There's a reason that the most productive Israeli-Arab negotiations have taken place in secret, not in "a predictable and regular forum."

"I believe," Lugar maintained in June, "it would be in the self-interest of every nation in the region to attend such meetings." Unfortunately, nations such as Syria and Iran don't conduct their foreign policy on the basis of what Dick Lugar thinks their interests are, or they wouldn't be destabilizing Iraq in the first place.

Lugar doesn't overestimate just the effects of diplomacy but the effects of a mere demonstration of a commitment to diplomacy. If we "demonstrate clearly that the United States is committed to helping facilitate a negotiated outcome" in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Lugar said, it "would undercut terrorist propaganda, slow Iranian influence, and open new possibilities related to Syria." All of that--not through diplomatic accomplishment, but through the mere show of being interested in one day perhaps achieving diplomatic accomplishments.

The senator warned that the administration must avoid becoming "quixotic in its attempt to achieve its optimum forecasts for Iraq." Instead, apparently, it must become quixotic in achieving the optimum forecast for regional diplomacy. Lugar said on Charlie Rose that our embassy in Iraq "might be a headquarters like Geneva used to be for various international groups." Like Geneva? In the midst of a Baghdad riven by civil war?

Lugar's construct that the Iraq War is coming at the price of regional diplomacy leaves out all that the administration has been doing on the diplomatic front lately. It is working to prop up Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and has the Israelis' cooperation in that project. It spent years forging closer ties with the Gulf states with an eye to the looming Iran threat, and a $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries is meant to cement those relationships. And U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has met with the Iranians three times to try to coax them to be more cooperative in Iraq--to no effect. All the while, the EU-3 have been trying to coax the Iranians out of their nuclear program--also to no effect. Lugar ignores all this in the belief that diplomacy can't truly happen until we lose the Iraq War.

And all this, oddly enough, qualifies as thoughtfulness. Republicans will be tempted to separate themselves from President Bush in September, and eventually our troop levels will have to decline in Iraq. But they shouldn't fool themselves. We either have to continue fighting to stabilize the country and rout al-Qaeda, or withdraw and admit those goals aren't achievable. A middle way, as Dick Lugar has unintentionally demonstrated, is make-believe suitable only for Senate speeches and TV interviews.

In his June speech, Lugar knocked "protagonists on both sides" for "ignoring the complexities at the core of our situation." But sometimes it's the protagonist in the middle who is the one who can't handle reality.