Bipartisan consensus could fix Iraq

President Bush has never been one for apologies or admitting mistakes.

His “Wild Wild West” attitude might seem charming to a movie audience, but it is hardly an attitude befitting the leader of the free world.

In reality, this mentality comes off as blindly ideological, willfully disconnected and terribly pathetic.

Only months after an election in which much of his party was removed from both the House and the Senate, Bush still believes that his past mistakes in Iraq do not warrant skepticism from the American people and members of Congress.

“I’ve spoken with many of you in person (about the war in Iraq),” the president noted in his speech. “I respect you and the arguments you made.”

He then went on to explain the decision he made after hearing what the people’s representatives had to say about the issue: “We’re deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq.”

President Bush may have spoken with members of Congress about Iraq, but evidently he did not listen to them.

In a resolution recently introduced in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats alike boldly voiced their opposition to increasing the number of troops in Iraq.

In November, voters sent a clear message to the White House: We want out of Iraq as quickly and responsibly as possible. Troop escalation is far from being the only solution to the quagmire in Iraq.

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware has proposed decentralizing Iraq into three separate ethnic regions united by a central government in Baghdad. Other Democrats have proposed various phased-withdrawal solutions that aim to prevent Iraq from falling in the hands of Islamic extremists.

Rather than pretending to listen to Democrats, the president should get serious about creating a new bipartisan consensus on the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism at large.

To his credit, Bush used his address to reach out to Democrats on the issues of immigration, energy independence and fiscal responsibility. He needs to apply this strategy to his foreign policy with equal enthusiasm before the situation in Iraq deteriorates any further.

Unlike the Daily Bruin editorial board, Bruin Democrats is not asking the president for an apology. The truth is, we know our country will never get one. However, we do believe that he could do our country a lot of good by simply acknowledging reality.

To put it mildly, the president needs to face the facts. A recent Washington Post-ABC opinion poll recorded his national approval rating at a mere 33 percent. If the president wants to win legitimacy for his decisionmaking in Iraq, he has no choice but to forge a true bipartisan consensus.

As the sun sets on his administration, the president must step outside the role of lone ranger and work with the Democratic Party to save Iraq.

If he does not, the party will heed the call of Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and “show him the way.”

Whatley is a third-year political science student. He is the media relations director for Bruin Democrats.