… then what are we going to do in Iraq? For a long time, President Bush repeated the phrase, “stay the course,” over and over to show his strategic commitment to Iraq. He meant that U.S. military forces are going to remain in Iraq at about their current numbers for the foreseeable future, trying to protect the Iraqi government that the U.S. created. As the sectarian violence has escalated and American casualties have increased recently, though, “stay the course” started to sound out of touch. So President Bush quietly stopped using the phrase, and then the Bush Administration started yesterday to loudly proclaim the rhetorical shift.

But the administration’s policy has not changed at all. At the strategic level, President Bush still expects American troops to stay engaged in Iraq for the foreseeable future. And at the tactical and operational levels, what the American military does on a day-to-day basis has changed repeatedly, as has the location in Iraq where the main weight of American combat power has been applied. Those adaptations have not always necessarily been in the right direction, and perhaps they have come too slowly at times. But Bush’s rhetorical change doesn’t reflect a new military reality; instead it reflects a fear that his “Stay the Course” line was painting the administration as a bunch of automatons. That would be both an undesirable message, politically, and an untrue one, at least on the details of the fight in Iraq. The policy has always been to make steady tactical and operational adjustments while maintaining the overall strategy, and that’s what it still is.

Meanwhile, a number of Republicans in Congress have also started to run from the “Stay the Course” line. Most of them, too, have no intention of changing the overall U.S. strategy: they think that the U.S. needs to stay in Iraq until we “win,” they still want the U.S. military to focus its day-to-day efforts on training the Iraqi military, and they have not changed their evaluation of U.S. goals or interests in Iraq.

No one is asking deep questions: How much is it worth to us for Iraq to be democratic rather than authoritarian? How much does stability in Iraq matter to the United States? How much leverage does the United States have in influencing the end-state in Iraq, and how much will be determined by forces beyond our control? A real rhetorical shift — or shift in the American political landscape — would start to raise these questions.

Instead, the phrase “partition” has started coming up more and more often in discussions of Iraq’s future — along with phrases like “looser confederation” and “regional autonomy.” I took those quotes from an NPR interview this morning with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, but Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and others have made similar comments recently, too. Stallwart military supporters like Virginia Senator John Warner have also started to question whether “there is a change of course we should take” without specifically saying “partition.” (For coverage, see this article in The Guardian; hat-tip to Steve Clemmons’ The Washington Note blog for the reference, although I’m sure there’s other coverage out there.) These are Republican Senators at least sort-of joining Democrats who have questioned the Administration’s “Stay the Course” line for some time.

On this blog, Jordan Tama wondered yesterday if bipartisanship could provide political cover for politicians advocating a new, improved Iraq strategy. He specifically mentioned the possibility that a bipartisan advisory commission — the Iraq Study Group, chaired by James Baker — might be the solution to allow the U.S. to change its Iraq policy. And certain Democrats are not-so-quietly lobbying for that outcome. Senator Joe Biden and Les Gelb, the chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, published an op-ed column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal making the same point. (Available by subscription only) Everyone seems to hope that the ISG Report, which will be released after the election, will restore bipartisanship to Iraq policy and get us out of our mess.

It may be dangerous to say this on a blog site hosted by an organization created in part by people involved in another great independent bipartisan commission — the 9/11 Commission — but independent advisory commissions are not the answer to America’s foreign policy problems. The Iraq Study Groups can’t fix what’s wrong. And I would still believe that, even if I thought partition would “fix” Iraq.

To begin with, the recent Republican questions about Iraq are hardly an indication of a new commitment to a bipartisan process. When Steve Inskeep asked Senator Santorum if his idea for a partition in Iraq was similar to what Senator Biden has been advocating for the past couple of years, Senator Santorum claimed not to have heard about Senator Biden’s proposal: “I wish I could tell you that I’ve seen what Joe Biden proposed, but I haven’t seen it. I’ve been sort of preoccupied with my own things here.” Senator Santorum is either horrified of saying something that a Democrat might also say (reflecting continued shrill partisanship), or he’s been living under a rock for the past few years while Biden has raised the partition issue (also not a good omen for bipartisanship, which would require the Republicans to start by at least paying attention to prominent Democrats). For this proposal to reflect a bipartisan opening, the new Republican partition converts would have to do their homework — and if they’re serious about their idea, then take the minimal steps to build a coalition to support it.

My main intent here is not to debate the merits of partition. Very briefly, I think partition is a bad idea: the logistics of making people leave their homes are very unpleasant, and I don’t want American soldiers to be in the position of dragging families onto buses that will take them to new homes in ethnically homogeneous regions. At the strategic level, I don’t want to reinforce the view among Iraqis that the U.S. is responsible for the long-term stability of Iraq, but if we tell the Iraqi government to pay huge costs to engineer a new, loosely federal state structure, Iraqi leaders will surely think that it is our job to make sure that all of the new regions are safe and prosperous.

And perhaps most important, I see no reason to believe that the partition would quell the violence. The regions would continue to fight each other, because each group to whom we would be giving regional autonomy (Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds) overestimates its military power, would want to “own” territory and resources in the other regions, and would want to harm the other groups (for revenge if for no other reason). The violence will stop when the groups decide that there is a rough balance of power or a “hurting stalemate” on the battlefield. Partition won’t bring about that peace-prone situation.

But the real point of this post is to consider the propects for bipartisanship on Iraq policy and to consider whether an independent commission report could help move our policy debate. What if Senator Biden and Les Gelb got their way, and the ISG recommended partition — and Senators Santorum, Hutchison, and Warner all stuck with their interest in exploring partition on the Republican side of the aisle? We might imagine bipartisan agreement to implement the recommendations of the panel, like there was bipartisan agreement to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

Of course, that exaggerates the bipartisan agreement on the 9/11 Commission recommendations. People didn’t carefully discuss and reach consensus on what the panel recommended. Instead, people rushed to get the issue of intelligence reform off the table, so they passed a bill. Later, it has turned out that it is hard to implement the intelligence community reorganization, and the organizational changes have not stopped partisan sniping about the content and quality of intelligence. The independent commission report did not lead to long-term bipartisanship at all, and the bipartisanship in the short term only had a small effect.

Could a similar thing happen with the Iraq Study Group? Yes, although the ISG report may have even less effect. Politicians will immediately endorse the ISG report with rhetorical flourishes: let’s do whatever they say. But implementation of a new Iraq policy (even just an operational change let alone a strategic change) will take time, and many details will have to be worked out — details that cannot be settled in advance by a broad policy statement. Any U.S. policy will face setbacks, and politicians will see advantage in trying to shift the blame for those setbacks onto others.

Ultimately, the only way to get a sustained change in the tone of the American policy debate on Iraq is to get an open debate about the various policy options — the realistic options that might have a chance of achieving the real U.S. goals in Iraq. Politicians and the public need to discuss the ends and means at our disposal. We all need to recognize our limits: even a country as powerful as the U.S. cannot get exactly what it wants in the world.

But independent commissions don’t contribute to an open national debate. They quietly deliberate and then offer a packaged answer to politicians and the public. That works where expertise is needed on a single problem that can be fixed in the short term. It does not work for persistent problems, where the solution requires domestic political consensus to give legitimacy, to allow policy experimentation, and to restore trust in our leadership.

The ISG is barking up the wrong tree. I’m holding out for politicians to bring the big questions to the American people. To start our real policy debate over our goals in foreign policy and the appropriate means to achieve them — and specifically over our goals and means in Iraq. Both Democrats and Republicans need to change the way they talk about Iraq. “Stay the Course” wasn’t part of that constructive debate, and I’m glad that it has been jettisoned. But I’m afraid that I may have to wait a long time for the real issues to replace such slogans.