A modest proposal for a new party

Dear Secretary Powell and Sen. McCain:

A terse email from an Iraqi friend in Baghdad – half-Sunni, half-Shia – shows him to be in despair. He had told me when I was there last summer that Saddam Hussein was like a cancer and the only treatment was chemotherapy, which was generously supplied by Americans. He approved of the treatment, even though it was already becoming painful and messy. “But you made this mess,” he said, “and you must stay to clean it up.” Now, however, he believes the treatment has lost its potency and has become Iraq’s new disease, not its cure.

The administration of which you, Secretary Powell, are a restraining member, and you, Sen. McCain, are a constructive critic, has become so radical it has lost its conservative bearings. Recall, please, how President Reagan liked to say he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him. Surely the two of you can today make that statement about the Republican Party.

It is time for the two of you to form a new party and become candidates for president and vice president. It does not matter which of you designates yourself the presidential candidate and which takes nominal second place because the country will know you are both Presidential and will be partners in stewardship. Perhaps you might call yourselves the Fusion Party; surely you will have Democrats on your policy team as well as in your administration. Your cause will appeal to eminent economists, lawyers, labor mediators, investors, public health officials, high tech experts, and many millions of citizens who will want to help bring our deeply divided country together. If your loyalties demand it, call yourselves the Fusion Republican Party. Whatever name you choose, you will immediately receive more support than either current candidate, as well as a thundershower of campaign dollars. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and both of you are extraordinary patriots.

Your party is currently in the hands of zealots like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. Is this the party of Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, or even of George H. W. Bush? Hardly. Edmund Burke, the great English conservative, supported the American Revolution but criticized the French Revolution’s excesses. “France,” he wrote, “has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal values. She has abandoned her interest that she might prostitute her virtues.” Similarly, Senator and Mr. Secretary, your GOP has been usurped and revolutionized, sacrificing American virtues on the anvil of naive and misguided ideology that is uninformed by rigorous knowledge of Iraq or its dominant religion.

If you think Edmund Burke, writing in the 18th Century, is too remote, try T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) writing for the Sunday Times of London in 1920: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqu?s are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” The echo is unpleasantly loud, isn’t it?

The word my Iraqi friend uses to describe Moktada al-Sadr is “hateful.” But he now sees the American occupation, in its current form, as being a recruiting agent for Sadr. If we eliminate Sadr himself, his very martyrdom will raise a banner of Sadrism that even more recruits will flock to, particularly since the loose-cannon leader is no longer around to be crazy but will have been elevated to the status of guiding spirit.

Old men in France, long in the tooth and with voices that rattle, tell their grandchildren how they were part of the heroic Resistance against Germans who occupied their country during World War II. (Whether they actually were or not.) Last year in Vietnam, during my first visit since the war, I saw elderly Vietnamese proudly saying they fought both the colonialism of the French and the invasion of the Americans. Can there be any doubt that a generation from now old men in Iraq will be telling their grandchildren how bravely they resisted the American occupation?

The torture-and-abuse scandal now points to the White House itself, where President Bush apparently solicited a memo from his general counsel that absolved his administration of responsibility for obeying the laws, the norms, or the Geneva Conventions when he wages war on terror. But the torture scandal is only a symptom, not the cause of our path to extremism. The cause is the individuals who make and set policy. They have forgotten that ours is a government of laws, not individuals, and they have arrogantly put themselves beyond both law and tradition. They have mocked domestic liberties as they have flouted international law, including the Geneva Conventions themselves that the United States signed and previous administrations have observed.

If, Secretary Powell, you feel you must remain inside the Republican Party, surely this is the moment for a principled resignation, honoring the precedent of Cyrus Vance who in 1980 resigned as Secretary of State to protest President Jimmy Carter’s illegal (and botched) military mission into Iran. Likewise, Sen. McCain, you can put the President on notice that you will henceforth publicly disagree with his failed policies. You can hardly feel much loyalty to a politician who treated you so shabbily in 2000. As Secretary of State and Senator from Arizona, neither of you needs any longer to be confined inside the insular and insulated tent where your voices are muffled.

If you choose to run for the Presidency, you will see poll numbers rocket through the roof. This won’t last because the TV attack dogs will go to work, but after the blather and ballyhoo of the Democratic and Republican Conventions, your stock will rise again.

If you win you’ll change the disastrous course that is daily losing approval at home as it has long since lost most support abroad. If you lose, you will have forced the electorate to face a reality the winner will not be able to avoid. Either way, you rescue the country – not Iraq but your own.

The point is, as you both seem to have recognized, our United States is now on the wrong side of history. Get us back on the right side. Together, you can make all the difference. As the announcer will say in a few days at Indianapolis, Gentlemen, start your engines.

Peter Davis is a writer and filmmaker who lives in Castine. He has covered both the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and in 1975 he received an Academy Award for his film on the Vietnam war, “Hearts and Minds.”