Dictatorship or Democracy?: You Decide

Today's New York Times has an interesting analysis of the response to the Baker-Hamilton report titled "Will It Work in the White House?" I excerpt key parts:

In 142 stark pages, the Iraq Study Group report makes an impassioned plea for bipartisan consensus on the most divisive foreign policy issue of this generation. Without President Bush, that cannot happen....

Assuming he is not ready to go that far, despite some recent signals of flexibility, he faces the more general question of whether he is ready to embrace the spirit of the report — not to mention the drubbing his party took in the midterm elections a month ago — and produce a new approach of his own that amounts to more than a repackaging of his current worldview.

The study group, for instance, calls for direct engagement with Iran and Syria; so far, Mr. Bush has refused. While Mr. Bush has steadfastly resisted a timetable for withdrawal, the report says all combat brigades “not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq” — note the careful use of the conditional — by the first quarter of 2008.

But the real target of the Iraq Study Group was Mr. Bush. ...

Members of the president’s party seemed to be adopting a kind of wait-and-see posture, praising the report for its seriousness and depth as they searched for clues about what Mr. Bush would do.

“I was impressed by the seriousness with which this group reached its conclusions and its plea that the level of partisanship we’ve seen in Iraq be toned down,” said Senator Mitch Mcconnell of Kentucky, who will soon be the Republican leader. But Mr. McConnell cut short any conversation of what Mr. Bush should do. “I’m not going to give the president advice,” he said.

The president spent weeks trying to shape the political climate in which he would receive the report....

Those moves have been aimed at giving Mr. Bush the flexibility he needs to do pretty much whatever he wants. But, meeting with him in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, the commissioners made a pointed appeal for him to give their study greater weight than his own, if only because it has the backing of both parties....

The real question now is whether the report can generate what the panel’s Republican co-chairman, James A. Baker III, called the “tremendous amount of political will” necessary to prod Democrats and Republicans into genuine cooperation — and Mr. Bush into embracing policy prescriptions he thus far has shunned.

As he stood before the press corps Wednesday to unveil the long-awaited report, Mr. Baker, a longtime confidant of the Bush family, was asked if Mr. Bush had the capacity to “pull a 180,” as the report would seem to require. He ducked the question then, but later answered it in an interview with Brian Williams of NBC News.

“I don’t know what the president will do,” Mr. Baker said. “But I do know this. I know the president is conflicted by the situation there. I know the president would like to approach this in a bipartisan way and in a manner that would have the support of the American people. Here’s a vehicle to do that.”

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I suggest that this is a description more suitable to a dictatorship (even if we call it a "constitutional dictatorship" than to a genuinely democratic government. Save for supporters of the Bush policy and his vision (such as Bill Kristol or Bart de Palma, who offered an eloquent defense on an earlier thread, whether I agree with it or not), most of the country presumably agrees that the policy is awful unto catastrophic. But we all wait, like supplicants outside the despot's chambers, for word as to, quite literally, who shall live and who shall die. (My particular favorite is the comment by the new Senate minority leader that he's "not going to give the President advice.") I didn't know that Mictch McConnell was so reticent. Perhaps the fact that his wife is held hostage as Secretary of Labor has something to do with it.

But, of course, it doesn't count against the Constitution (or cause us to think of genuine reform) that we are in such a position.