Clear-eyed on Iraq, and pride

It can be an awkward position to be in. You warn that policies are wrong-headed, that mistakes are being made, that the situation, whatever it is, will only become worse unless people come to their senses and change course.

Then what -- hope to see your dire prophecies fulfilled, just so you'll be proven right? Perverse human nature might tempt us in that fashion, but people who have their ethical ducks in a row don't permit themselves to sink into that kind of swamp.

It's not likely we'd find David Price, for example, in full gloat over the fact that his objections to the war in Iraq as instigated by the Bush administration have turned out to be pretty much on the money.

The Democratic congressman from Chapel Hill, re-elected last month to his 10th term, in 2002 voted against giving President Bush the authority to go to war, arguing among other points that U.N. efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had not run their course. With hindsight it's not difficult to conclude that if the U.N.'s inspectors had been allowed to complete their work, they would have come up empty-handed, and a pillar of the case for overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein would have gone wobbly.

Since then Price has reminded us how the war in many respects has had just the opposite of the desired effects. Instead of making America safer by knocking out the vicious tyrant Saddam, he contends with good reason that it has weakened us by over-stretching our military, draining the treasury and breeding even more terrorists who have been drawn to the fight.

Then there's the loss of focus on the parallel conflict in Afghanistan (discussed also in an editorial on this page). Price faults the White House for slacking off on what should have been Anti-Terrorist Job No. 1 in favor of the ill-conceived Iraq effort, and then proceeding to bungle that effort about as badly as it could be bungled. It's a powerful critique and one that becomes ever harder to dispute, if anyone outside the Oval Office would even be inclined to try.

With the debate now beginning to center not so much on whether Americans should leave Iraq, but how soon and under what conditions, Price could be permitted another told-you-so moment. He tried more than a year ago, along with his junior colleague Brad Miller of Raleigh, to get the House on record as favoring a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Republicans then in control of course stymied the measure. With Democrats about to take charge on Capitol Hill, it wouldn't be a surprise to see such a resolution resurface and gain a head of steam.

Price can land a hard rhetorical punch and his partisan credentials are gilt-edged. Still, he has gained respect on both sides of the aisle.

This former Duke University political science prof simply knows how government ought to operate and has good instincts for what it should be trying to achieve. His criticism of the Iraq venture notwithstanding, he has become a leader in U.S. efforts to encourage the spread of democracy abroad. And the chairmanship he is set to assume, of the appropriations subcommittee for homeland security, will give him a key role at home.

It was his Yale Ph.D. that launched Price into the academic world, from which he then emerged as a practitioner of the "science" he had taught. But before grad school (and after his undergraduate days at UNC-Chapel Hill), Price took another Yale degree, from the divinity school. So there's not much of a shock in finding, on his congressional Web site, a short essay entitled "Theological Roots of Humility in Politics."

"Integral to the Jewish and Christian traditions is the recognition that people are inclined to a kind of idolatry whereby they identify their own interest or ideology with God's sovereign will," Price writes. "But that will remains transcendent and is only imperfectly reflected in human endeavors, which are invariably subject to the taint of self-seeking and the will to power." He goes on to note Lincoln's humility in declining to identify his effort to get rid of slavery as a mission carrying a divine stamp of approval.

A famous Yale cleric and peace advocate, the late university chaplain William Sloane Coffin, denounced the Bush war venture in a New Haven speech a few weeks after the 2003 Iraq invasion (I was in the audience). Pride and self-righteousness were among our national stumbling blocks, Coffin believed.

David Price, for all his success in the hard-bitten political world, sees those stumbling blocks clearly. So it was a fitting stroke for the Yale Divinity School this fall to present him with its annual William Sloane Coffin Award for Peace and Justice. Don't expect him to brag about it, just as he isn't likely to brag about his prescience on Iraq. But that doesn't mean he hasn't earned a salute.