Eleanor Clift: Geo. Voinovich has broken ranks with Republicans to criticize Bush’s Iraq War policy

[babylonsister]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19751096/site/newsweek/

Dissenting Voices
George Voinovich has broken ranks with Republicans to criticize Bush’s Iraq War policy. Why he thinks he’s making a difference.


by Eleanor Clift
Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 4:31 p.m. ET July 14, 2007

July 13, 2007 - Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich keeps a small memorial on the desk of his Capitol Hill office. Consisting of a photograph and a wooden desk plaque of U.S. service medals, it was given to him by a constituent whose Marine son died in Iraq. “It just reminds me about the fact that every day two or three of our brothers and sisters die, and I think there’s another way of doing this,” Voinovich said in an interview Thursday.
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Voinovich is one of the breakaway Republicans giving the White House fits as President Bush bargains for more time to let his “surge” policy work. But unlike some of his colleagues, the 70-year-old Voinovich is not getting pressure from administration heavies to toe the party line. National-security adviser Stephen Hadley knows where Voinovich stands and has pretty much given up on trying to corral him. A former governor of Ohio and mayor of Cleveland, a Democratic city, Voinovich may be a relative newcomer to the U.S. Senate with eight-plus years of service, but he is no political novice. “This is my 40th year in this business. As a mayor or a governor, you either deal with it or you get left behind.”

When he talks about “it,” he means the war in Iraq and the loss of confidence at home in the president’s war policies. Voinovich’s frustration has been many months in the making. The bookshelf in his Capitol Hill office is full of books about Iraq and the Middle East. “The Threatening Storm” by Kenneth Pollack had an impact on his decision to support the invasion of Iraq, and he’s read all the books that have come out since about how the war has been mismanaged. He rattles off a string of them. Books like Thomas E. Ricks’s “Fiasco” and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” documenting the administration’s naiveté and incompetence, persuaded him the war and its aftermath have been a disaster. Based on all this research, he felt compelled to challenge Iraq war hawk and fellow Republican John McCain on the floor of the Senate this week about the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Echoing White House talking points, McCain assailed the “liberal left” for wanting to abandon the fight and said that battling Al Qaeda is the principal mission in Iraq. The normally mild-mannered Voinovich came close to violating Senate protocol when he shot back that without American troops in Iraq, Al Qaeda wouldn’t be there.

Voinovich has become so passionate about spreading the word about what he’s learned that he bought every member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a copy of “What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam” by John L. Esposito. He thinks a lot of his colleagues didn’t appreciate the religious passions that roil the Middle East and still don’t realize the extent of the religious fervor driving the violence in Iraq. “I’m still shocked,” he says that people don’t know that Shiites, while the majority in Iraq, form only a small minority of the overall population in the greater Middle East. The rest are Sunnis, an ethnic breakdown that holds both peril and promise for U.S. policy in terms of forging allies and exerting pressure.

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[whistle]

1. Welcome back Senator Voinovich, now please change your vote on the war

...and bring our troops home now!

[gratuitous]

2. He's "breaking ranks"; that doesn't mean he'll vote against Little Boots

I think Clift got buffaloed by Voinovich, just like all those "maverick" Republican Senators who make a public statement that could be construed as less than 100% supportive of Bush and his excellent little war, but when it comes time to vote on a bill, they scamper back to the safety of the GOP Big Tent Corral. (Cf. Gordon Smith of Oregon for the exemplar.) Voinovich, as I recall, was similarly disenchanted with Bush a couple of years ago when he chaired a committee and actually permitted some opposition testimony. But when it came time to vote on the matter at hand, Voinovich was another reliable ballot for More of The Same.

Watch what they do, not what they say.

[TwilightGardener]

3. Nope, Gordon Smith has been a key anti-war vote, along with Hagel--

the rest of the so-called dissenters, however, have been worthless.

[whistle]

4. Exactly!