Lugar Has Little Say Over U.S. Policies on Iraq

For almost 20 years, as one of the most respected internationalists in Washington and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) was a man whose voice counted when it came to U.S. foreign policy.

It was Lugar, after all, who pressured President Reagan to shift gears and back Corazon Aquino as the newly elected head of the Philippines in 1986. And five years later, it was Lugar who defied GOP conservatives and played a key role in giving the former Soviet Union hundreds of millions of dollars to safeguard its nuclear weapons.

Now, however, as Iraq teeters on the brink of chaos and U.S. casualties soar, Lugar has played no significant role in one of the most critical foreign policy issues of his career. The Bush administration has openly ignored him. And, to the disappointment of admirers in both parties, Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has held back from forcing the issue.

In part, Lugar’s isolation is symptomatic of how little Congress is being consulted by the administration. It also reflects the extent to which political polarization now casts its shadow over policy debates in Washington. And in part, Lugar’s lack of impact on Iraq policy may reflect his own decisions about how cautious to be in expressing his concerns.

To be sure, Indiana’s senior senator is one of only a handful of congressional Republicans willing to express even the slightest concern about President Bush’s policies in Iraq. In recent weeks, he suggested that more troops were needed, pointedly asked who would rule in Baghdad’s planned new government, and questioned whether Bush’s June 30 deadline for turning over power is realistic.

But he has not mounted the kind of direct challenge to a president’s policies that some of his colleagues have privately hoped he might. Nor has he assayed the kind of role Foreign Relations Committee chairmen have sometimes played at critical moments in the past -- including Lugar himself.

Although universally respected in both parties for his record as a plain-speaking independent, Lugar has increasingly been viewed as a marginalized elder statesman.

“There’s a sense that he’s just not stepped up,” said a rueful senior Senate Democratic staffer who counts himself as one who admires Lugar’s knowledge and stature. “He’s always been a very loyal Republican, never been a bomb thrower. By virtue of that, everything he says carries enormous weight. At times like this you look to people like him for guidance and structure.”

For his part, as Lugar moved through three days of Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq that began Tuesday and were scheduled to end today, he seemed determined to change a perception that he was not pressing the administration hard enough about its plans for stabilizing Iraq. And he put the Bush foreign policy team on notice that it ignored Congress at its peril.

Yet he continued to express his views in the kind of restrained terms that the White House has so far felt it could brush aside.

As the hearings opened Tuesday, Lugar voiced dismay at the administration’s failure to provide top-level officials to answer his committee’s questions. Before a largely empty hearing room, he read out a long list of questions that he said the administration needed to answer to persuade Congress and the American people that the transition could work.

On Wednesday morning, Lugar opened the second hearing by reading the same list of questions. He vowed to keep asking them until he got answers, even if that meant holding another round of hearings in a couple of weeks and again summoning administration witnesses.

“I mean, you repeat it until finally, finally, people who are in a position of responsibility come to grips with what they must do and the support they will need politically, financially,” Lugar said in an interview after Wednesday’s hearing.

“I doubt whether the administration thought that they would get such specific questions every day.”

But there were few signs that anyone in the White House was listening. Lugar acknowledged that he had had no conversation with Bush about Iraq since last September, when he and the president talked about it during a 90-minute flight to Indiana.

Asked whether he was troubled by Bush’s failure to consult with him, Lugar replied: “Not necessarily,” he said. “The president can’t talk to everybody, every day.”

But he warned that if Congress did not get answers to its questions about who would be running Iraq after June 30, how the U.S. would coordinate with the new Iraqi government and how it would pay for operations there, then Congress might push plans of its own.

In discussing Iraq, Lugar recalled events in 1991, when he teamed up with Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat, to force through U.S. aid to the Soviet Union for safeguarding nuclear weapons. Said Lugar, “The Nunn-Lugar initiative was not a presidential plan.

“Sometimes there isn’t an administration plan. Sometimes there are such divisions they can’t get together on a plan. The president is not well served by this, but there’s no need for all of us to be conflicted, and I’m saying, in our committee, we have a pretty strong bipartisan focus. If we had to write a plan, we could do so.”

With the overwhelming majority of his fellow Republicans lining up behind Bush, however, and most Democrats treading cautiously, it’s hard to see how even an emboldened Lugar could seize the initiative.

Rather, many analysts see his marginalized position as symptomatic of a capital so traumatized by the threat of terrorism and so politically polarized that questioning presidential decisions has become much more difficult than it used to be.

“After Sept. 11, I don’t care who was running the place, you would have been deferring to the executive branch,” said Lawrence Korb, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. “Even the Democrats voted for going to war.”

And now, while they fret that the administration is making mistakes, Korb said, Republicans hold back from criticizing because of election year partisanship.

If Lugar “shines the light too brightly, gets too independent, it gives aid and comfort to the Democrats,” he said. “When you had more bipartisanship, you could discuss these things without the ‘gotcha’ factor.”

Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Armed Services Committee staffer, likened Lugar’s position to that of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

“They fundamentally disagree with the president’s strategy,” Cirincione said, “but they are inclined to be loyal. They don’t want to do anything that undermines the party or the president, but as his foreign policy turns from risky to disastrous, they’re searching for ways to change course.

“That’s Lugar’s fundamental dilemma.... He’s trying to steer the ship by pointing out the right direction, rather than by calling for a change of captains.”

Lugar and other Republicans -- and many Democrats -- voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq and voted to grant Bush’s request last year for an additional $87 billion to fund military operations and reconstruction there. These supporters of the war now say they believe it is imperative that Iraq be stabilized and agree with Bush that pulling out before that is accomplished would be a disaster for U.S. national security.

But they are increasingly worried that public support will erode unless the administration goes beyond rhetorical expressions of resolve and lays out a clear roadmap for stabilizing Iraq and eventually bringing U.S. troops home.

“The responsibility we have [in Congress] is a very specific one,” Lugar said. “That is to help the administration define what our plan is, and perfect the plan before it is tested in the field. If in the worst case [the administration] really doesn’t have answers, then that’s a good reason for asking the questions and being very persistent about it.”

For now, however, persistent questioning is as far as Lugar seems prepared to go.