Hi it’s Josh Marshall from TPM media, it’s Tuesday June 19^th, 2007. You know we’re looking now, we came right off the 2006 election, and the president came out with his idea of a surge, a build-up of troops to finally get control of the sectarian violence in Baghdad. We were told then that it needed until the summer, perhaps till September, to really get a sense of whether the policy was going to work. Now that September is getting close we’re told that September really isn’t enough time to judge the success of the policy and really we’ve got to wait until perhaps the end of the year, even to 2008.

Everybody knows this story, and it’s really a recapitulation of everything that we’ve seen in the Iraq war and President Bush’s handling of the war going back to the middle of 2003. Now what this brings up and what I’d like to talk about today is the question of war-time presidential leadership. Now going back to the days right after 2001, the presidents war-time leadership has basically been judged on one axis and that is what his defenders would call his resoluteness, his unwillingness to bend even in the face of adverse fortune, and what critics, like myself, would call his inflexibility, perhaps just his denial, his unwillingness ever to shift policy no matter what the facts seem to tell him. Now again that’s generally seen as a strength of a war-time leader, the unwillingness to change, that stick-to-itiveness, not bending this way and that depending on the facts of the day, but when you look at how the military trains officers and how you judge war-time leaders in the past, that’s really not the only virtue of a war-time leader and perhaps not even the most important.

Look at the way the military trains and thinks about military leadership. There’s two kinds of courage that are talked about. One is physical courage, and that is what we generally in a colloquial sense think of as courage, that is the ability, the willingness to put yourself, willingly put yourself in danger, face danger, not flinch in the face of physical danger. That’s really a sine qua non of a soldier. But again particularly in military leaders that’s not the only quality that you’re looking for. The other quality is what they refer to as moral courage. Now moral courage can mean a lot of things but more than anything else it means the capacity to make decisions. In a military context often that means decisions that will send men and women to die in a battle, but more than anything it’s the ability to make decisions in real-time with the knowledge that you don’t have all the knowledge and that you can’t predict the future and that the decisions that you make may have terrible adverse consequences. More than anything else it means not being incapacitated by that responsibility. It’s the kind of ability the general has to have on the battlefield.

Now this brings us back to the surge and this endless kicking the can down the road that we saw in 2003, 2004, 2005, always that a turnaround was going to be there six months in the future, and that we just had to wait and stick with the policy and eventually it would get better even though now it’s years later and it’s clear that really nothing has changed.

You know Reed Hundt is one of our contributors at TPM Café and he has a post today that is calling out the democrats, telling them that when it comes to September and the fall of this year, it’s not just a question for President Bush whether the surge is working, it’s a question for them, what is their position going to be on Iraq, what is their position going to be on what’s happening in Israel/Palestine, what is there position on Lebanon? In each of these areas we have growing civil wars, so in Iraq what is it going to be, stay, stick with the surge, pull back and have some sort of residual force, whatever that means and whatever purpose that might serve, or pull out altogether. In each of these cases I think that Reed Hundt is talking about the same thing, the power of decision. At a certain point you need to make the call, and that is why I believe that President Bush has actually been a disastrous president. In various areas of his presidency he’s not willing to make the tough decisions about a place like Iraq. He just wants to keep kicking it down the road, stay in really denial and never make a decision.

The country, I think though, is failing in a similar way to President Bush. It’s not a question of always another six months, always another plan is going to work, a real leader comes forward and makes the category decision, even knowing that we can’t know what going to happen, that we can’t know what the consequences of our own decisions will be. If we pull out of Iraq maybe it will be a disaster, it’s clearly already a disaster now, but just staying with the same policies, ignoring our responsibility for the situation, and continuing in a state of denial, that is a true failure of leadership.

There’s no question the president has it, but what about the democrats? What about potential republican successors to the president? Where do they come down and make the big decisions? I don’t think at the moment we’re really hearing it from any of them.

You know President Bush’s conceit is that the tough decision is to stay the course, to keep doing what we’ve done for the last four years and hope, pretend, that it’s going to yield a different result than it has up until now. But that’s not the tough decision, the really tough decision is to come out and make the category call that a lot of what we’ve done here was a mistake, that we need to change course, that it’s better for us, for U.S. national interests, and probably better for the Iraqis that we leave Iraq. That’s a painful decision, and it’s a damaging decision for us, at least in the short-term, but in the long term it’s probably the right call. Regardless though, that would be a tough decision. Staying and keep saying that it’s six months, a year, a new plan, a this, that’s the path of least resistance, that’s the easy call. And that’s President Bush’s call. Even now as a lot of people realize that we can’t stay in Iraq indefinitely, you see the same excuse making, well we gotta leave but we gotta leave in six months, we have to leave in nine months we’ve really got to go. Even that is the same sort of denial, the same sort of excuse making.

So that’s the question, who among the presidential candidates on the democratic side, on the republican side, has the capacity to make the big decision right now, the bold stroke that will address the crisis that we face in Iraq? The president isn’t willing to do it, he just wants to keep kicking it down the road forever and that’s his idea of courage, of being a great war-time leader, never changing your mind even though it’s clear that you’re contributing to a disaster. So who will it be? And tell us what you think that policy should be. I’m Josh Marshall from TPM Media, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.