Cheers and jeer for the Senate
The Senate was at its best and worst last week, launching a vital national discussion on Iraq policy and allowing ideology and partisanship to kill a prescription drug plan for seniors.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Iraq hearings exposed massive uncertainties about how to handle the threat from Saddam Hussein, letting the public in on the debate that’s raging inside the government.
The only area of disagreement not covered in the hearing is a dispute about a vital question — whether Saddam actually has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Former United Nations chief weapons inspector Richard Butler, and former Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza, asserted convincingly that Saddam is definitely working on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons arsenals, but this view is disputed by another former inspector, Scott Ritter, who was not invited to testify.
The overwhelming balance of logic and evidence tilts toward the Butler/Hamza view — including German intelligence reports cited by Butler that Saddam will have a nuclear weapon by 2005 — but Ritter claims that Iraqi arsenals were all destroyed.
Beyond that issue, however, other points of dispute were aired — especially the questions of whether containment can work as a policy against Iraq, whether a large or small U.S. ground force will be needed in the event of an invasion and whether U.S. allies would support us.
For the sake of building international support, it may be useful for the Bush administration to push hard for full and complete international weapons inspections in Iraq — so that, when Saddam fails to comply, grounds exist for waging war against him.
Meantime, though, planning for combat is going forward — and should be. Allies may well fall into line behind the United States when they know that an attack is inevitable and will be successful.
The most furious dispute of all concerns the size of U.S. forces required. Top Pentagon civilians and Vice President Cheney apparently believe that new precision-guided munitions make it unnecessary to commit hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to battle.
It’s a major GOP theme this year that House Republicans produce legislative achievements — including a drug bill — but Senate Democrats don’t. Senate Republicans didn’t want to abandon their political playbook even to protect seniors.
Ideological considerations evidently were involved, too, because the White House opposes any measure that does not involve using private insurance companies to deliver Medicare services.
Separately, however, the GOP also killed another major Democratic compromise idea — advanced by Sen. Edward Kennedy (Mass.) — that would have accepted a GOP-style private delivery mechanism in return for a $450 billion price tag. Republicans wouldn’t agree to the money.
The signs are good for doing their duty on Iraq, the biggest issue of the year. But prescription drugs represent a massive failure for which voters should hold the GOP to account.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)