“A New Consensus”
Weekly Column of U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander
July 15, 2007

Congress and our President and our country need to find a consensus about where we go from here in Iraq. It is our most urgent and difficult issue. I know it is on the minds of every single Senator every day. It’s the first thing on my mind. It deserves to be. Adding up the lives, the dollars – $10 billion a month, 3,600 lives, and many wounded – shows a truly difficult situation.

We owe it to our troops fighting there – when they look at Washington – not to see us shouting at one another but saying, “yes, we can agree on why you are there, where we are going, what our goals are” and saying to the rest of the Middle East that we know what we are doing in Iraq. We must give the Iraqis a chance to flourish. Our troops deserve to see the free debate in the U.S., but more importantly that we are capable of coming to a conclusion, especially on our most urgent issue.

Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) and I have written legislation being debated this week to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report, and we have been supported by 11 other senators from both parties already. We hope more will join us. Our legislation will declare the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to be official U.S. policy, ask the President to prepare a new plan based on those recommendations, and require a report on the implementation of those recommendations every 90 days.

President Bush is right that we can’t afford to fail in Iraq. That is why I support the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that would provide for a long-term but more limited American military presence in Iraq and a transition over the next year from combat to training and support.

It is important for the president, the Congress, our country and our troops that we speak with one voice on Iraq. The Iraq Study Group report is a way to build that bi-partisan consensus. Our job in Washington – from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue – is to look for some way to come together on Iraq so the troops will know that we support them in the foremost issue of our time.