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.
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.
In February, Voinovich gave a speech on the Senate floor saying the Iraqis need to work this out among themselves and that we can't do it for them. Then in late May, he spent five days at an Aspen Institute in Slovenia (he is of Slovenian descent) talking about political Islam. He carried with him a fat folder with all the testimony on Iraq from the Foreign Relations Committee. Though he sits in on all the hearings, he hadn't read all the testimony. "I immersed myself in this thing for five days and thought about it and decided I had to share my feelings about what needed to be done."
On that same trip was Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, who apparently had the same epiphany. As the senior member in an institution extremely sensitive to prerogatives, it was up to Lugar to make the first move. "Dick shared with me he was going to do his own thing," says Voinovich. "He'd do his thing, and I'd do my thing." Lugar, a loyalist on the war, took much of Washington by surprise when he spoke out on the Senate floor late last month to say the surge was not working as intended and that there should be an immediate change in policy. He had given Voinovich a heads-up, and the next morning Voinovich delivered the speech he had prepared, which had been ready for some time and which said pretty much the same thing.
Voinovich's passion about finding a new course in Iraq is matched only by his vagueness about what he might actually vote for. Still, he's convinced there's been a sea change. "What Dick and I have tried to accomplish is happening," he says. "They [the White House] are moving. I'd stake my life on it--how fast and how comprehensive, I don't know. From a management point of view, it takes time to get these things done. We may have gotten in the wrong way, but we can get out the right way." With that kind of optimism, the GOP can't afford to write him off.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
