Admiral Says Leave Iraq in Eighteen Months, Wins Congressional Race

I had lunch today with a three star retired Navy admiral named Joe Sestak. We ate at the Grill in Beverly Hills, where an Admiral in or out of uniform is only a bit more interesting than a failed guest on Dance America or whatever it's called. The Admiral is slight, handsome and fairly sparkles with enthusiasm. He sports a partially braided blue bracelet adorned with small dice-sized blocks that in any configuration spell out the name "Alex." He does not look like an admiral and he certainly does not seem taken in the least with the Hollywood scene in which he was today.

Joe Sestak is a candidate for Congress whose resume reads like something a Republican from central casting, except that this Harvard Ph.D., former National Security Council senior staffer who left the military in January, is a Democrat. He's running in a district just outside Philadelphia against Curt Weldon, a nine term incumbent Republican who has never won a race by less than 20 percentage points.

Until I sat with the Admiral, who insists on being called Joe and therefore is all the more a leader, I would have thought that a military man running against a long term incumbent would navigate carefully and gently around his opponent, determined to stay close to "the center" and never willing to chart his own course. In other words, I thought that Admiral Sestak would say, "Well, Iraq's a mess, but we need a real plan. We have to work our way out." That's what Weldon and most Republicans say today.

Wrong. Admiral Joe Sestak says that we have to get out by the end of 2007. He says that if we stay until the mess calms down, we'll be there for years or decades more and all the while our national security will be imperiled. Dr. Sestak speaks clearly and forcefully about the occupation. The fight now is among and between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites. The U.S. cannot possibly stop the fighting, not unless we send in the 200,000-300,000 more troops that General Shinseki said we'd need to begin with and for which Donald Rumsfeld honored Shinseki with an early retirement, proving firmly in this case that the truth shall indeed out.

Joe easily recalls that Bush himself said that the three main national threats to the US are North Korea, Iran and Iraq. He made Iraq more of a threat by tying our troops down there and keeping us in a grinding, no-win occupation. He left Iran wide open to distract the world while it builds nuclear bombs. And Bush has not a clue what to do with North Korea, apparently busily diffusing uranium into bombs that one day will ride on those missiles that Kim Jong Il occasionally lobs -- so far errantly - toward Japan or further.

And then there's terrorism. Without the financial and police resources to do what the Brits did last week, Sestak posits that Bush has made us weaker by tying us down in an occupation that has only one ending, and it is not a happy one for us.

But here's what's most interesting. Admiral Sestak is running as the underdog against a reasonably popular incumbent, in a race his candor and blunt optimism have made among the most competitive Congressional races in the country. In short, the Admiral may retire the Congressman by running on strength and courage, not on the sway-backed monotones of the triangulators who usually predominate in provision of advice in such races.

Admiral Sestak is overshadowed by Bob Casey's race against Rick Santorum, a race that is getting closer every day as Santorum keeps fighting and Casey keeps still, firmly planted near some dead reckoned center. Francine Busby ran a Casey-like campaign in San Diego against a former congressman and lobbyist. She took a low profile on Iraq and instead talked about cleaning house in Washington and about seven policy points.

She lost.

Joe Sestak looks to be a winner. Let's hope that Bob Casey (whom I have supported consistently for nearly a year) and others see that the voters want leaders, not just dimmer shades of red. The bracelet was made by Joe's five year old daughter who is now, happily, on the mend from brain cancer. She made it for Joe the night before her first treatment. She seems to be okay now, sufficiently so that Joe feels that for his daughter's future he has to win. That's the kind of fire that combines with experience and passion to make a Congressman. And that's what the framers had in mind all along: citizen legislators who'll take up the cause of politics to keep the republic on track, not to keep themselves in office by slithering left and then right, leaving the nation no where at all.