On Iraq War, Senate Panel Picking Up Where Russert Left Off

So far, the Bush administration has faced more tough questions about its plans in Iraq from the hosts of the Sunday morning television talk shows than from the 19 men and women of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Week after week, the hosts of the five Sunday shows have doggedly poked and prodded the administration’s most senior figures to reveal their thinking. But no one elected Tim Russert and Bob Schieffer and Wolf Blitzer. The Constitution doesn’t give them the responsibility for examining the president’s strategy when he commits young Americans to war.

That obligation belongs to Congress. And within Congress, it lands first in the offices of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations -- and more specifically on the desk of the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.).

The committee traces its history to December 1816. Half a dozen presidents, from Andrew Jackson to John F. Kennedy, served on the committee. So did more than a dozen secretaries of State. Over the last 187 years, the committee has helped shape the debate on virtually every major choice America has faced in its dealings with the world.

But too often over the last year, the Foreign Relations Committee has been silent on the choices America faces in Iraq. The committee has held hearings this year on America’s relations with Pakistan, India, Libya, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. It has explored AIDS in Africa and immigration from Mexico. It has examined the threat of international intellectual property theft and the challenge of improving America’s public diplomacy.

These are all worthy matters. But they are not the cause that has sent some 135,000 young Americans into combat. Yet not since September has the Foreign Relations Committee conducted a public hearing on the events in Iraq.

The committee did hold a closed briefing with a senior State Department official in March. Earlier this month, it investigated the scandal in the U.N.’s “oil-for-food” program. But as the casualty count and public unease about the war have mounted this year, the committee has not gathered publicly to explore the administration’s thinking on Iraq and explain the choices to the American people.

“This is how we earn our pay; this is what we’re supposed to be doing,” says Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the committee’s former chairman and now its ranking Democrat. “If we don’t do this now, what the hell is the value of the committee?”

The committee’s long silence will end this week with three days of hearings on Iraq. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it will convene panels of outside experts, both supportive and skeptical of the administration’s course.

On Thursday, the committee will press Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, to define more clearly the administration’s plans for reverting sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30.

These hearings come as President Bush has taken an important step toward his critics by embracing a larger role for the United Nations in designing that new government. But many questions remain.

Exactly who will constitute the new Iraqi government? How much authority, if any, will that government possess over American troops? Is it realistic to elect a permanent Iraqi government by January 2005, as currently planned? What must be done to minimize the risk that Iraqis will elect an anti-Western Islamic government? How much will the continuing reconstruction cost American taxpayers?

Three days of hearings won’t answer all of these questions. To fulfill its historic responsibilities, the committee will need to shine a sustained spotlight on the administration’s direction in Iraq, especially in the critical weeks until the scheduled June 30 handover.

That would undoubtedly mean some difficult moments for Lugar. He is a brilliant former Rhodes scholar and Navy officer who knows as much about foreign policy as any senator. In his views, he is a descendant of the post-World War II generation of centrist internationalists who believed America lengthened, rather than constricted, its reach when it worked with allies through international institutions.

That perspective has left Lugar increasingly out of tune with a Republican Party -- and especially a Bush administration -- that generally place a much higher priority on maintaining American freedom of action than mobilizing international support. He knows many Republicans would prefer his committee stay silent.

Unlike, say, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lugar doesn’t enjoy banging heads with a president of his own party. Lugar has muted his criticism even when the administration has declined to send witnesses his committee has requested -- as it is doing again by withholding Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Office of Management and Budget Director Josh Bolten from this week’s hearings.

But what Lugar may need to remember is that his committee has often made its greatest mark when its chairman looked beyond party lines. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the committee after World War II, earned his place in history when he broke with a predominantly isolationist GOP to help President Harry S. Truman construct the alliances that won the Cold War.

Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Democratic chairman of the committee a generation later, ignored fierce resistance from Lyndon B. Johnson, a president of his own party, to hold hearings in 1966 that crystallized public and congressional doubts about the Vietnam War.

Lugar is under no obligation to oppose Bush on Iraq. But Lugar’s position obligates him to pursue the answers Americans need to know, not just this week, but week after week. Does anyone imagine that if William Fulbright were sitting in the chairman’s seat now, with Americans dying every day and momentous decisions approaching in Iraq, he would leave the toughest questions to Tim Russert?

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns at www.latimes.com/brownstein.