Time for consensus on Iraq

On the day that the esteemed elders in the Iraq Study Group released their much anticipated report, about 350 old sailors and soldiers were gathering in Hawaii to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

The two images tell us a lot about how differently two dates of infamy – Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks – have evolved in memory. Like Pearl Harbor, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks rekindled a national purpose and cohesion that had sustained the United States through World War II. But the linkage between the two events has become as tenuous as the times we live in.

Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, launched the United States into the all-out destruction of Nazi Germany and imperialistic Japan. In 44 months, a sleeping giant completed that task and began the rebuilding of Europe and Asia.

But 63 months after Sept. 11, 2001, a prolonged and increasingly dangerous conflict in Iraq has frayed the clarity of purpose and clouded the place that Sept. 11 now occupies in the national consciousness.

Julius Finnern, of Menomonee Falls, Wis., was a fireman first class on the destroyer Monaghan that rammed a Japanese submarine and escaped to sea during the attack. He knew at that moment of impact that he was in a war and who the enemy was. Finnern never bought the assertion that Sept. 11 was a second Pearl Harbor.

“They are separate events,” Finnern, 87, the secretary of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, said by phone from Wisconsin. “(Sept. 11) didn’t slide into World War III, although we’ll probably have like the scripture said: war until the end of the Earth.”

Yet he warns that the threats of radical Islam are every bit as dangerous as what his generation confronted, and he worries that Americans do not take the threats as seriously as they should

Finnern couldn’t make the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor because “my arthritic bones wouldn’t take the nine-hour flight.” But about 350 vets, most 80 or older, were expected in Hawaii. A Pearl Harbor scholar likened it to the last big gathering of Civil War veterans at Gettysburg in 1938.

The Pearl vets went to hear speeches and take tours of memorials, while their children and their grandchildren struggled to deal with another war, halfway around the globe.

There is “no magic formula” for Iraq, warned James Baker, a former secretary of state and co-chairman of the study group. It will take a “diplomatic offensive” in the Middle East and “a tremendous amount of political will” at home.

His counterpart, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, was equally blunt: “We do not know if it can be turned around. But we have an obligation to try.”

They recommended 79 policy changes both here and abroad, the most significant being engaging both Iran and Syria diplomatically on the future of Iraq.

Nowhere did the report aspire to President Bush’s once-lofty goals of Iraq as a peaceful ally and democratic model in the Middle East. Instead, the report was essentially a containment strategy.

The minimum first step would be a truce in partisan Iraq politics at home:

“For President Bush, it will require an explicit acknowledgment that his way has not worked and a 180-degree turn on Iran and Syria. Bush has long blamed those two neighbors for exporting terrorism and instability. Nearly four years ago, Bush labeled Iraq and Iran as two parts of the “axis of evil.” The Baker-Hamilton commission now sees Iran as key to stabilizing a new kind of Iraqi threat – the spread of sectarian war throughout the Middle East.

“For Democrats, it will mean dropping the blame game and taking ownership of the war as a matter of national security. It can start with the flacks at the Democratic National Committee dropping their “Bush’s War of Choice” missives. Democratic votes gave Bush the authority and political cover to invade Iraq in 2003.

More than half of Senate Democrats – 28 all told – and 81 House Democrats voted for the use-of-force resolution in October 2002. The list includes five Democratic senators or ex-senators now pondering a run for president in 2008: Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.; Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; John Kerry, D-Mass.; and John Edwards, D-N.C.

Kerry said then that he was convinced Saddam Hussein’s “deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” posed a “real and grave threat” to American security.

Saddam is gone. Most Americans are beyond second-guessing what got us to this dangerous juncture. What they want is a reasoned strategy to rally behind.