Iraq? Who Cares! Say, Is Your Mom Jewish?

By Joe Klein

When he talks about the war in iraq, Jim Webb--the Democrat running for the U.S. Senate from Virginia--likes to paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower on the war in Korea. "Anyone who tells you we can set a timetable for withdrawal doesn't understand war," he says. "And anyone who says that nothing can be done to speed a secure peace doesn't understand America." Yeah, but America is a less disciplined place than it was 50 years ago, and speeding a secure peace requires some focus from a country--and an Administration--that is largely awol on Iraq. Webb is consumed by the war, in part because his son Jimmy is a Marine lance corporal deployed in Ramadi, in al-Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency. He has worn Jimmy's combat boots every step of the way in this campaign, and last week he told me quietly, "Last I heard, Jimmy's unit was about to sweep one of Ramadi's toughest neighborhoods."

It is difficult to imagine what it was like to be Jim Webb last week. It should have been the moment that his race against Republican Senator George Allen crystallized. Two debates were scheduled. They promised to be the sharpest discussion about Iraq in any Senate campaign this year. Allen's support for the war has been uninflected but not entirely uninformed. The Senator has visited Iraq several times and has a solid knowledge of the contending forces there.

Webb's opposition to an invasion of Iraq predates the first Gulf War. "I thought we would empower Iran, and we have," he says. His views are precise but complex. They are based on a lifetime studying warfare, first in the Marines and then as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. And there were moments in the two debates when Allen and Webb--especially Webb--seemed about to settle into the sort of serious discussion of Iraq that the nation desperately needs, but those moments were fleeting. Moderators interrupted, time limits were imposed, other topics were raised. And then there was the business about Allen's Jewish heritage, which overwhelmed everything.

It was fabulous political theater, of course: Allen naked in the public square and squirming, by turns awkward, craven and hilarious in his four-day hegira from white-bread Presbyterianism to the admission that his mother was a Sephardic Jew, from the famed Lumbroso family. By week's end, Allen--the least likely Semite in Christendom--was sitting there stunned as cnn's Wolf Blitzer rattled off the list of brilliant Lumbroso ancestors: doctors, historians, the chief rabbi of Tunis! The Senator argued that his mother had been traumatized by the Nazis; her father had been pulled from his home in the middle of the night and sent to a concentration camp. She wanted to protect her children from the lethal plague of being Jewish. It was all anyone in Washington was talking about last week. It was all just so Oprah.

But what about Jimmy Webb, clearing the toughest neighborhood in the toughest province in Iraq, an area that the senior Marine intelligence officer in the region said was slipping into the control of al- Qaeda? I figured someone owed candidate Webb a serious conversation about Iraq last week, and so we sat down to discuss how he would end the war. Webb pointed out that most U.S. troops in Iraq are stationed in four large forward operating bases (FOBS), part of an implicit U.S. strategy to maximize "force protection"--that is, to limit casualties. In fact, there has been a fierce internal debate within the Army about whether to take the troops out of the FOBS and station them closer to the action in the urban neighborhoods of Baghdad. "If the strategy is to hunker down," Webb said. "We might as well have them hunkered down in safer places like Kuwait and Jordan, while keeping our special-ops forces and air support active in Iraq."

I asked him whether he was worried about leaving al-Anbar in the control of al-Qaeda. "I've got to believe that Iraqis don't like terrorists, either," he said. "Right now in Anbar, the focus is on us--the occupying army. If we weren't there, my guess is the local Sunni insurgents would quickly turn against the al-Qaeda terrorists, many of whom are foreigners, and kick them out." That sounded like wishful thinking. I told Webb that most top military strategists--even those appalled by the Bush Administration's feckless prosecution of the war--didn't think his strategy would work, that Iraq would fall into chaos without American troops.

"Look, I can't sit in the third row of the bleachers and tell you exactly how we end this thing," he said. "And I'm not saying, Let's just pull 'em out, and who cares if the thing falls apart behind us. But the U.S. military wasn't built to be a police force, and we certainly shouldn't be the referees in a civil war. Iraq's neighbors are better positioned to handle that. We need to get the neighbors--including Syria and Iran--involved in stabilizing Iraq, but the Bush Administration has no interest in diplomacy." Webb's argument is flawed, but what Iraq scenario isn't? It should be the centerpiece of a serious national debate. But we remain a nation befogged by affluence and voyeurism, where the story of George Allen's mother is far more compelling than that of Jim Webb's son.

Shame on us.