BRING THE PEACE

If all goes well today, thousands of Mainers will gather on village greens to protest the war in Iraq, just as protesters are gathering in Washington to recreate the 1967 march on the Pentagon that marked the turning of public opinion on Vietnam. We hope their voices are strong and their message is heard. But “Stop the war” can’t be the only message. “Bring the peace” deserves even more support because with it comes the victory of lives saved in Iraq.

Four years into the Iraq war, the Bush administration’s original justifications for fighting have drifted away, with the falsity of the weapons of mass destruction claim exposed and the reality of Saddam Hussein dead, and been replaced with a grinding fight it didn’t properly anticipate. The public frustration and anger are understandable and are fed by a narrow-minded focus on troop strength.

Debating whether we need more troops or fewer or none at all misses the point of the chaos this nation has created and what it must do as a result. The debate on next steps continues in the House but was stopped in the Senate on Thursday, when Majority Leader Harry Reid’s war resolution failed. That plan would have directed the president to begin withdrawing troops in four months and remove nearly all of them by March 2008. The dates get the news coverage – and the opposition – but the value of the resolution was in its demand that the withdrawal be part of a diplomatic, economic and political strategy to bring stability to Iraq.

An overwhelming number of Americans think the war was handled badly by the nation’s political leaders. When protests arise as they are today, the administration and its supporters in Congress too often shelter themselves by defending the ability of the troops. But it isn’t the troops who are being doubted. It is the inadequate, underemphasized possibilities ignored by Washington.

Economic incentives in parts of Iraq away from the fighting, the reversal of de-Baathification policies, integrating Sunnis more deeply in the political process, provincial elections, broader regional agreements with Iraq’s neighbors and an agreement on sharing oil revenues all could contribute to sturdy peace in Iraq, unlike a temporary peace brought by swarming one area with additional troops – for how long?

The United States can’t simply order these things to happen, but it can expand its effort with the Iraqi government to emphasize how important it believes nonmilitary solutions to be, and it can back up these ideas with consistent support for them, support the public is likely to offer as well.

The Pentagon, in its recent quarterly assessment of security and stability in Iraq, concluded that improving the situation in Iraq is much more than a military mission. Similarly, after the Senate vote, Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said, “We put too much of an emphasis on military solutions and too much of a burden on our troops to execute all areas of our strategy.”

This consistent analysis of the limitations of the military presence in Iraq must be turned into policy. In some parts of the country such as the more secure south, the military phase is over and rebuilding is under way. But approximately 100 Iraqis die daily in the sectarian fighting in Baghdad and elsewhere. More than 2 million Iraqis have left the country in recent years, its most able, its middle class, its future, forced out by violence and a lack of hope for anything but more violence. A nation traumatized by the rule of Saddam Hussein has a new generation traumatized by this war.

More than 3,200 American troops have been killed in Iraq. More than 32,000 have been wounded, thousands severely. A quarter of returning veterans, many of them National Guard members, are suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. They come home to a nation rived over the date by which troops should leave Iraq.

The Bush administration had a chance to take the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations on nonmilitary solutions to Iraq and turn them into a broad, aggressive policy for success there. It rejected them. Congress should bring them back, recognize where the administration has made some progress, and demand that much greater resources and energy go into diplomacy, the Iraqi economy, provincial political inclusion and national reconciliation.

It must make peace as vigorously as it was willing to let the president make war.