The Democrats’ Gonzales

By David S. Broder
The Washington Post
Thursday, April 26, 2007; Page A29

Here’s a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats — a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.

If you answered ” Harry Reid,” give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end.

President Bush’s highly developed tolerance for egregious incompetence in his administration may have met its supreme test in Attorney General Gonzales, who at various times has taken complete responsibility for the firing of eight U.S. attorneys and professed complete ignorance of the reasons for their dismissal. This demonstration of serial obfuscation so impressed the president that he rushed out to declare that Gonzales had “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.”

As if that were not mind-boggling enough, consider the mental gyrations performed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) as he rationalized the recent comment from his majority leader, Harry Reid, the leading light of Searchlight, Nev., that the war in Iraq “is lost.”

On “Fox News Sunday,” Schumer offered this clarification of Reid’s off-the-cuff comment. “What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost — in other words, a war where we mainly spend our time policing a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. We are not going to solve that problem. . . . The war is not lost. And Harry Reid believes this — we Democrats believe it. . . . So the bottom line is if the war continues on this path, if we continue to try to police and settle a civil war that’s been going on for hundreds of years in Iraq, we can’t win. But on the other hand, if we change the mission and have that mission focus on the more narrow goal of counterterrorism, we sure can win.”

Everyone got that? This war is lost. But the war can be won. Not since Bill Clinton famously pondered the meaning of the word “is” has a Democratic leader confused things as much as Harry Reid did with his inept discussion of the alternatives in Iraq.

Nor is this the first time Senate Democrats, who chose Reid as their leader over Chris Dodd of Connecticut, have had to ponder the political fallout from one of Reid’s tussles with the language.

Hailed by his staff as “a strong leader who speaks his mind in direct fashion,” Reid is assuredly not a man who misses many opportunities to put his foot in his mouth. In 2005, he attacked Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as “one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington.”

He called President Bush ” a loser,” then apologized. He said that Bill Frist, then Senate majority leader, had “no institutional integrity” because Frist planned to leave the Senate to fulfill a term-limits pledge. Then he apologized to Frist.

Most of these earlier gaffes were personal, bespeaking a kind of displaced aggressiveness on the part of the onetime amateur boxer. But Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition — defined by the Iraq Study Group– that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

The Democrats deserve better, and the country needs more, than Harry Reid has offered as Senate majority leader.

davidbroder@washpost.com

Pelosi defends visit to Mideast

By Christina Bellantoni
The Washington Times
April 7, 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday defended her whirlwind Middle East peace mission in the face of wide criticism about her choice of words — and fashion — during the trip.
    
The California Democrat, who touted her visit abroad as fostering diplomacy and following the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation, said yesterday she is spreading “President Bush’s message” of anti-terrorism.
    
The Bush administration and others all week accused her of overstepping her bounds and making critical gaffes as she, five other Democrats and one Republican met with heads of state in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories. The lawmakers’ goal was to stimulate a regional solution for a peaceful end to the Iraq war.
    
The speaker’s visit with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus, over Mr. Bush’s objections, drew the most ire. It prompted the Wall Street Journal editorial board to wonder whether Mrs. Pelosi was trying to embarrass the president.
    
Mr. Bush called the trip counterproductive and Vice President Dick Cheney said he was “disappointed” in Mrs. Pelosi, calling her actions in Damascus a signal that the U.S. is rewarding Mr. Assad for his “bad behavior.”
    
But the speaker told the Associated Press yesterday she thinks the visit proved U.S. leaders are united against terrorism.
    
“Our message was President Bush’s message,” she told AP. “The funny thing is, I think we may have even had a more powerful impact with our message because of the attention that was called to our trip.
    
“It became clear to President Assad that even though we have our differences in the United States, there is no division between the president and the Congress and the Democrats on the message we wanted him to receive.”
    
Mrs. Pelosi also attracted negative headlines for telling Mr. Assad that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sent a message with her that he was “ready to engage” in peace talks, a claim Mr. Olmert quickly refuted.
    
The Washington Post editorial board called the trip “foolish” and an “attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president.”
    
A Pelosi staffer on the speaker’s Web blog denounced The Post editorial as “poisonous,” and refuted the opinion point by point. The staffer noted that five Republican members who visited the region on a separate trip this week elicited no White House commentary.
    
As for the message from Mr. Olmert, Mrs. Pelosi said yesterday there was “absolutely no confusion.”

“The message that we carried from Prime Minister Olmert was the exact message that he gave us,” she said on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” “He is a man of peace, and he expressed to us that we should express to the president of Syria his interest in going to the negotiating table — but not until Syria took steps to stop its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. And that is exactly the message that we conveyed.”
    
Mr. Cheney held nothing back Thursday when appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, saying he wished she had not gone to Syria.
    
“I think it is, in fact, bad behavior on her part,” he said.

“Fortunately I think the various parties involved recognize she doesn’t speak for the United States in those circumstances.”
    
Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, called the trip “embarrassing.”
    
“Speaking on matters of foreign policy with one voice is critical for the country,” he said. “That’s why we have highly trained diplomats and other such professionals in the federal government. Whether you agree with a particular administration or not, playing high-profile politics with matters of state is reckless and dangerous for the country.”
    
USA Today said the speaker “crossed a line” by meeting with Mr. Assad. A guest columnist in the Wall Street Journal suggested she may have violated a law forbidding Americans from talking to foreign governments without U.S. authority if they are trying to “influence that government’s behavior on any ‘disputes or controversies with the United States.’ “
    
Conservative group Move America Forward used the Pelosi-Bush dust-up over Syria in a fundraising e-mail, saying the money would help it “respond to this despicable conduct by Ms. Pelosi and others in the anti-war movement.”
    
Even her choice of dress — a head scarf in a Syrian mosque and pastel pantsuits — drew scorn from conservative bloggers this week.
    
Also on the trip were Reps. Tom Lantos and Henry A. Waxman, both California Democrats, Nick J. Rahall II, West Virginia Democrat, Louise M. Slaughter, New York Democrat, and Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat and the only Muslim member of Congress.
    
Rep. David L. Hobson of Ohio, the lone Republican on the delegation, defended Mrs. Pelosi as helping the administration, according to the Dayton Daily News.
    
“We reinforced the administration’s positions and at the same time we were trying to understand and maybe getting some voice to some things people wanted to say that maybe they were not comfortable saying to the administration,” he told the newspaper.
    
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Mrs. Pelosi’s group got a “warm welcome” from Middle East press, and quoted several reports, including one Jordanian newspaper saying the Syria visit is a “step in the right direction.”
    
Also yesterday, staffers for Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer revealed the Maryland Democrat had spent the past week on his own congressional delegation of six Democrats and four Republicans to Sudan, Egypt, Greece and Germany.

Back to Baker-Hamilton

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; Page A13

Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who is a one-man bipartisan commission, recently suggested a simple test for evaluating political leaders. The best choice, he told a Washington gathering, is the person who can build consensus around difficult policy issues.

By that measure, we are seeing a long list of would-be dividers but not many leaders. The United States is losing a war in Iraq, yet instead of uniting around a policy that could reduce the damage and create a sustainable strategy for the future, Congress and the White House are on a collision course over funding for the troops.

A glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians haven’t all lost their minds was a statement this week by Barack Obama challenging his party’s extreme wing. “I think that nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “I don’t think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage.”

Obama has the political maneuvering room to be sensible now because he was skeptical about the war from the start. But that didn’t stop a blast from the left-wing blogger Kos, who wrote Monday that Obama “just surrendered to Bush.” If Obama is in fact ready to challenge his party’s most partisan activists, perhaps he is a man who can meet Hamilton’s test.

The Democrats’ problem is that they seem determined to join the Bush administration in doubling down bad bets on Iraq. In the Democrats’ case, the mistaken gamble is that by imposing a Washington timetable for troop withdrawal, America will compel good behavior from the fratricidal Iraqis. That idea is naive. But then, so is the Bush administration’s politically divisive strategy for an open-ended troop surge in Baghdad. No matter how clever Gen. David Petraeus’s battle plan, it won’t work unless it can be sustained politically, in Baghdad and Washington. The crucial asset for Petraeus is time, which in turn is a function of political consensus at home. And that asset is wasting, even as the number of U.S. troops goes up.

Here we return to Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, and his partner on the other side of the bipartisan hyphen, former secretary of state James A. Baker III. Four months after its release, the Baker-Hamilton report still looks like the best way to unite Democrats and Republicans before there is a dangerous collision over funding for the war. The report has something for everyone: It shares the Democrats’ goal of withdrawing most U.S. troops by March 2008 and stresses the need for milestones in Iraq. But it endorses the Bush administration’s view that milestones should be jointly negotiated with the Iraqi government, rather than imposed by Washington. And it recognizes that troop withdrawals must be contingent on political and military conditions on the ground.

The Baker-Hamilton report focused on the need for a sustainable policy — one that would make Iraq an American project rather than George W. Bush’s war. That requires a shift in military strategy from U.S. combat operations to a counterinsurgency approach centered on training and advising the Iraqi military. But the study group, composed of five Democrats and five Republicans, also said it could “support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission.”

The most controversial aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report was its call for greater American diplomatic engagement in the region, including talks with Iran and Syria and a new push on the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Four months later, Bush administration officials have sat around a table in Baghdad with Syrians and Iranians, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is beginning a serious effort to midwife the birth of a Palestinian state, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is visiting Damascus. We’re all Baker-Hamiltonians now.

The Baker-Hamilton report offered a way out of the partisan wilderness when it was released in December. It still does. It provides an Iraq platform on which responsible Republicans and Democrats can gather. Neither side will get everything it wants, but both can claim a measure of support for their positions. That’s the essence of building consensus.

A train-wreck debate on Iraq will be destructive for both parties, not to mention the people in the Middle East. The Baker-Hamilton report is the best framework for building a policy that is sustainable, in Washington and in Baghdad. Leading Republicans and Democrats say that, in principle, they still support Baker-Hamilton. So do something about it.

The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues at
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal
. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

U.S. military plans Iraq fallback strategy: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. military planners have begun work on a fallback strategy in case the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq fails, including a gradual pullout of U.S. forces and more emphasis on training and advising Iraqi forces, the Los Angeles Times reported in Monday’s editions.

The strategy, based partly on the U.S. experience in El Salvador in the 1980s, is in the early planning stages, the newspaper said, citing U.S. military officials and Pentagon consultants who spoke on condition of anonymity.

It is a fallback if the Bush administration’s plan to send about 26,000 more U.S. troops fails to stabilize Iraq, or if the Democratic-led Congress limits that move, it said.

The newspaper quoted a Pentagon official as saying “This part of the world has an allergy against foreign presence. You have a window of opportunity that is relatively short. Your ability to influence this with a large U.S. force eventually gets to a point that is self-defeating.”

The United States sent 55 Green Berets to El Salvador to help its military fight rebels from 1981 to 1992, in a drive to make the U.S. military presence less visible, the newspaper said.

It said Pentagon officials said the Iraq plan would have to entail many more advisors, but that the El Salvador model had influenced planning.

There are currently about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Shifting from a troop increase to more reliance on an advisory role would bring the administration more in line with the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that recommended a gradual reduction in U.S. combat forces in Iraq.

See the L.A. Times report:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-planc12mar12,0,4250952.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Joe Biden We Hardly Knew Ye (And Already You’ve Demolished Your Own Candidacy, Again!)

By John E. Carey
February 1, 2006

Senator Joseph Biden, Jr., the Democratic Senator from Delaware and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has announced his intention to pursue the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.

Well; now I have seen everything. One of the most self-important in a room of 100 potential egomaniacs steps forward again to become his party’s standard bearer. Joe Biden is going to take another shot at the piñata.

Didn’t he whack himself with the bat the last time?

Here is how Big Joe Biden’s biography, which he undoubtedly wrote himself, begins on his web site:“Joseph R. Biden, Jr. was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972 at the age of twenty-nine and is recognized as one of the nation’s most powerful and influential voices on foreign relations, terrorism, drug policy, and crime prevention.”

Well, I was working on Capitol Hill the year Senator Biden first arrived in the Senate. He jabbered so much even as a freshman Senator that Senate staffers routinely lampooned him behind his back.

All these years later, sadly, they still do.

Senator Biden has been in Washington D.C. ever sine 1972 because he pretty much has never had another job. But after watching him in limited action during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting with ISG co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton this week, one had the feeling that two mental giants were facing….something less.

And the staffers in the passageways of Senate Office Buildings still tell tales of Biden’s endless stream of verbiage.

Fred Barnes said on the Fox News Channel last night, “Biden’s problem, as everybody knows, is, he talks too much.”

Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote for February 1, 2007 editions: “A gifted orator, Biden has been plagued by a reputation for being windy and verbose, whether while chairing a Senate hearing or speaking at political gatherings around the country.”

But if this reputation was not enough; Senator Biden is now insisting, almost daring, the media to resurrect all his real and sometimes meaningful self inflicted wounds.

But before we get to his old wounds, lets review what happened on the day that Biden entered this latest race, yesterday.

The New York Observer published a remarkable story in which Senator Biden shares his off the cuff remarks about his Democratic opponents.

Biden is quoted evaluating presidential rivals Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, former Sen. John Edwards, D-North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.

But with everything Biden said, you might find it hard to believe that he managed to insult Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Shirley Chisholm and other prominent African-Americans on the eve of the start of African-American History Month.

The good Senator Biden opined about Senator Barack Obama, the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

So this really is storybook, man! On the day he announced his candidacy for president, Senator Biden had to issue this apologia:”I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama.”

And then Biden urged reporters to believe one of the oldest excuses of all: the remark was taken out of context.

Actually, the remark was taken out of Senator Biden’s mouth as he was, apparently, inserting a foot.

The conference call confession with reportes sounded like this:

“Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” Biden said on the call.

“And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’”

Well, there is a sound bite that Mr. Obama should have framed just in case he faces off with Mr. Biden for just about anything in the future.

For his part, Senator Obama issued this statement: “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”

What a memorable opening day in this baseball season! A U.S. Senator throws out the first pitch and hits himself with it.  Or he throws his hat into the ring (to reveal his neatly and surgically replanted hair),  only to harm his own cause just as he elevates another candidate and embarrasses himself.

Just the day before this circus, on Tuesday this week, the sage Senator Biden chaired his own Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His witnesses, there to testify for more than two and one half hours? Former Presidential Chief of Staff and Secretary of State James Baker and a real foreign policy expert, former Representative Lee Hamilton.

The topic? Nothing much. Just the war in Iraq, the “surge,” and the Iraq Study Group (IRG) which the two witnesses co-chaired.

After just a few minutes into this hearing one had the feeling that “one of the nation’s most powerful and influential voices on foreign relations” was facing some real mental muscle. You know what Senator Biden did? He excused himself: as if there was something really important going on elsewhere. I was riveted to the testimony of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton. Joe Biden missed a huge chunk of it. I only hope he had it on TiVo.

The witless-one apparently didn’t want to spend too much time with the witness duo.

And didn’t Senator Biden run for president years ago?

Sure. Joe Biden made himself a candidate in 1988, nearly 20 years ago. So you would think that in that amount of time a man would mellow past the age of ridiculous gaffes.

His last campaign for president tanked when it was revealed that he plagiarized a speech by the leader of the British Socialist Party and palmed it off as his own.

Just last July Senator Biden said before C-SPAN video cameras in his home state of Delaware: “In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

Have you no shame, man? Or have you no brain? If we skip past those questions, then apparently you have no competent staff members that can keep you on the leash.

Joe Biden is still an amateur after all these years of grooming himself.  Get a new mirror Senator; you are not presidential material.

Is this the first candidate in history to have to apologize on day one of the campaign for something he didn’t have to say…and a year before he had to say anything? We’d have to ask the History Channel.

Two things are for sure: Senator Joe Biden is a walking Macaca remark factory!

And I, for one, sure hope he stays in the race a while!

Visit more serious news at:

http://peace-and-freedom.blogspot.com/

**********
TIME Magazine said: “

It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now, there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile a gaffe, it’s been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or, more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down.”

See:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1585476,00.html

Refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan: A Growing Crisis

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees, held hearings on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 to probe the issue of the plight of refugees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senator Ted Kennedy chaired the hearing, and, while many conservatives who frequent the commentary pages of the Washington Times (where my work frequently appears) find little in common with the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy has been and remains a stalwart on the issue of refugees.

One had the sense while witnessing this hearing, that we were seeing the Liberal Lion of the Senate at his best.

We’ve republished Senator Kennedy’s recent op-ed on the refugee situation and will report more on today’s hearings in the days ahead…..

By Edward M. Kennedy
The Washington Post
Saturday, December 30, 2006; Page A21

With the nation still at war in Iraq, each of us is deeply grateful to the brave men and women in our armed forces who celebrated the holidays this year with half their hearts at home and half in Iraq. But this year especially it is essential that we also reflect on another human cost of the war — the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children who have fled their homes and often their country to escape the violence of a nation increasingly at war with itself.

The refugees are witnesses to the cruelty that stains our age, and they cannot be overlooked.

America bears heavy responsibility for their plight. We have a clear obligation to stop ignoring it and help chart a sensible course to ease the refugee crisis. Time is not on our side. We must act quickly and effectively.

Today, within Iraq, 1.6 million people have already fled or been expelled from their homes. An additional 1.8 million, fleeing sectarian violence, kidnappings, extortion, death threats and carnage, have sought refuge in neighboring countries. At least 700,000 are in Jordan, 600,000 in Syria, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran and 20,000 in Lebanon. Typically they are not living in refugee camps but have relocated in urban areas, where they must draw on their own meager resources to pay for food and shelter, and must depend on the good graces of the host governments.

The neighboring countries, in turn, are under enormous financial stress from the rapidly increasing needs of the refugees. In Jordan, they now make up more than 10 percent of the population — the equivalent of 30 million people flooding America’s shores. These countries are increasingly unable to meet the refugees’ basic needs.

Borders are being closed to more and more of these men, women and children, with the result that many who are most in need or in danger are trapped in the Iraqi caldron of violence. As it continues to boil, the humanitarian crisis will only worsen.

The recent report of the Iraq Study Group rightly concluded that if this refugee situation “is not addressed, Iraq and the region could be further destabilized, and the humanitarian suffering could be severe.” Sadly, as with so many other aspects of the Iraq war — from the growing threat of the insurgency to the need to provide adequate armor for our troops — the administration has failed to recognize the breadth of the crisis and to adjust our policy to address the plain facts on the ground.

There is an overwhelming need for temporary relief and permanent resettlement. Last year, however, America accepted only 202 Iraqi refugees, and next year we plan to accept approximately the same number. We and other nations of the world need to do far better.

Thousands of these refugees are fleeing because they have been affiliated in some way with the United States. Cooks, drivers and translators have been called traitors for cooperating with the United States. They know all too well that the fate of those who work with U.S. civilians or military forces can be sudden death. Yet, beyond a congressionally mandated program that accepts 50 Iraqi translators from Iraq and Afghanistan each year, the administration has done nothing to resettle brave Iraqis who provided assistance in some way to our military. This lack of conscience is fundamentally unfair. We need to do much more to help Iraqi refugees, especially those who have helped our troops.

Our nation is spending $8 billion a month to wage the war in Iraq. Yet to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the refugees who have fled the war, the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the current fiscal year.

America needs to lead, but we cannot adequately respond to this overwhelming crisis alone.

Because of the magnitude of the problem, we also need action by Iraq’s neighbors and the rest of the world. An essential first step could be to hold an international conference on the issue — ideally sponsored by the countries in the region and the United Nations — to begin to deal with the growing number and needs of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. The United States should participate in the conference and provide substantial support for the refugees. Doing so would encourage other nations to address the crisis, help the refugees and displaced persons, and assist the countries shouldering the greatest burden.

Working with Iraq’s neighbors and the United Nations, we can encourage rapid action to relieve suffering and save lives. And a productive conference could lead in turn to broader discussions and greater progress on the future of Iraq.

Clearly, in the long term we need to work together to find a way to end the violence and stop the hemorrhaging of lives. In the short term, America needs to respond far more effectively to the needs of the millions of refugees and displaced persons who are suffering so much from the war. Failure to act quickly and cooperatively with other nations will only result in more carnage, chaos and instability in the region.

The writer is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and incoming chairman of the Senate immigration, border security and refugee subcommittee.

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http://peace-and-freedom.blogspot.com/