Meeting with reporters Thursday morning in Washington, Shays was a case study in anguish. His party botched the job in Iraq, and he’s lost his credibility and maybe his belief in the process. “I am struggling with my faith,” he said, declining to elaborate. Shays has come to this breakfast to regain his credibility, to convince his media inquisitors that he is not playing politics but is “an honest purveyor of what I see.” He is wrestling with his religious convictions as a Christian Scientist, and his partisan beliefs in a war that has gone badly.
Such agonizing is not new for Shays, who publicly pondered for weeks whether to impeach President Clinton before finally voting no, and who routinely struggles with how much he should reveal of what he learns in classified briefings. After one such briefing, he refused to allow his daughter to go to New York for New Year’s Eve and warned friends against flying to Europe. He worried about the ethics of preserving only the lives of his loved ones. Nothing happened, but what if it had? Shays is an unlikely member of today’s Republican Party, pro-choice, a dreamy philosopher by nature, chairman of the Arts Caucus and the Friends of Animals Caucus. Shays sought conscientious-objector status during the Vietnam War and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Fiji Islands. He agonized over the first gulf war, voting for it only after he “sorted it out” with the first President Bush. As for Iraq and the “epochal struggle” it represents, he says, “I’m 40 years older than when I was a conscientious objector. I have changed my views about needing to confront evil.”
Returning last month from his 14th trip to Iraq, Shays reluctantly concluded there had been no progress since the new government was installed in January, and that there wouldn’t be any unless the Iraqis were prodded. Some members of the Baghdad government were vacationing in Geneva while U.S. troops were getting shot at, he said with disgust. “Everything they said they were doing, they weren’t doing. It was all talk and no action.” What was he to do, he asked. Say everything is great? Instead he blew the whistle on the administration’s rosy talk. As a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, he knows the administration has a secret plan, a timeline. “They call it a conditional timeline,” he said, and it’s been wrong so many times, “They would rather have you think they don’t have a plan than a plan that doesn’t work. What they expect to have by the end of the year is absurd,” he said.
The administration’s “conditional timeline” is classified, but its strategy of “standing up” the Iraqis so U.S. troops can withdraw is public knowledge. Shays is pressing the administration to give Congress a number of how many Iraqis it needs to reach that magic moment when American soldiers can begin to come home. “It’s a huge disconnect for me,” he says, that not one American has stepped down even though the administration says it has trained 124,000 Iraqis. “When they get up to the full complement of what they say they need, we’ll still have 150,000 troops in Iraq,” he predicts. “What they’ll say is things have gotten worse.” The administration owes Congress and the American people a realistic timeline, one that might call for more troops. “It’s clear they don’t have enough troops now,” he says.
Listening to Shays defending his position and his integrity for more than an hour is dizzying. It’s like being caught in a hall of mirrors. He wants to both support and condemn the Iraq war, his party and his president. He says Bush has “no credibility whatsoever,” beginning with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But Shays calls the war “a noble mission,” and says he shares the president’s belief that “the only way to turn around the world is to help introduce democracy.” He can’t believe anyone would think he would make decisions about war and peace based on an election, yet he attributes political motives to Democrats who voted for the war, and who are now, three and a half years later, on the side of the critics. Hillary Clinton and others get a “free pass,” he complains, whereas he wants everybody to understand, win or lose, that he is speaking the truth. “I want my credibility,” he beseeches the scribes around the table. The journalists are a cynical bunch and aren’t buying all his moral rectitude; what isn’t clear yet is whether Connecticut voters will be more forgiving.
