Revisiting Iraq

When members of Congress visit Baghdad, do they see a “dog and pony show,” as Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) suggested recently on NBC’s “Meet The Press”?

Webb was seeking to deflect a question put to him repeatedly by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who kept asking the freshman whether he had actually been to Iraq. The encounter was testy. Webb displayed the gruff demeanor for which he is known and Graham added venom to his customary smoothness.

Graham argued that the surge in American troop levels and the new counter-terrorism tactics of Gen. David Petraeus needed time (and domestic support) to work. Webb argued that Graham was improperly putting political rhetoric into the mouths of U.S. troops.

But the question of whether Webb had been to Iraq neutralized the other points they were making. Going there, seeing the situation firsthand and talking to American military personnel and to Iraqis has become a trump card in such arguments.
Webb could not dismiss Graham’s question. He suggested that congressional visitors spoke to only an insignificant number of people, he mentioned that he had covered two wars as a correspondent, he even said he had visited Afghanistan, which deflated his own argument that such trips to war zones are of no value.

No matter where his argument went, it ended back in the same place — he was critical of Iraq policy and trying to shape a new one without having gone to see for himself how it was working.

Such visits may be pointless (although we doubt it) in practical terms because well-informed secondhand sources can provide lawmakers the information they need. But congressional delegations (codels) to Iraq are anything but pointless from a political point of view. They give lawmakers the stamp of credibility on the subject. Which is why so many lawmakers have been to Iraq, some of them many times.

As our survey by The Hill’s Patrick Fitzgerald today reveals, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) has been to Iraq 10 times, which has helped make him the Democrats’ point man on the war. (One wonders what he thinks of Webb’s “dog and pony show” comment.)

There was a fascinating op-ed in The New York Times this week, in which two Brookings Institution scholars, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, who have been critical of President Bush’s war policy, came back from an eight-day visit to Iraq with the impression that progress was being made, that a pull-out would be premature if undertaken before next year, and that Washington’s debate on the war was “surreal.”

It may be true that some lawmakers go to Iraq merely to add credibility to their preconceived positions. But with the September deadline approaching for a decision on the troop surge, it seems that August recess codels might yield something substantive and crucially important.