On the eve of President Bush’s State of the Union address, three prominent Stanford professors have called for a “new way forward” in Iraq, condemning the administration’s new plan for the increasingly unpopular war as “too little, too late.”

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Mae Ryan

Larry Diamond, Scott Sagan, William Perry and James Fearon in a panel disccusion about the current situation in Iraq

In a noontime panel yesterday in Encina Hall, Management Science and Engineering Prof. and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said that Bush’s “surge” plan to send 21,000 additional troops to the war-torn nation would do little to fix the “disastrous security situation” on the ground there.

“It’s obvious that we’re in a very big hole,” Perry said, adding that the president’s plan was “tactical and not strategic” and “only deepens the divide in our country.”

A member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose recommendations Bush largely ignored, Perry admitted he was “conflicted” about reports that Congress would attempt to halt Bush’s aims by cutting funding for the troop escalation.

“It’s very difficult to execute that in practice,” he said, after pausing for several seconds to respond to a question from the audience.

One of Perry’s counterparts on the panel, Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, was more explicit in his calls for Congressional oversight over any emerging conflict in the Middle East.

“We have a chance to get it right now, in terms of not bombing Iran,” he said.

Diamond, who served as an advisor to Iraq’s provisional government in 2004 — work which led him to author a book titled “Squandered Victory” — did not mince words in laying out a policy proposal that included greater accountability on the part of Shiite Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, dialogue with secular insurgents and nearby Arab states and assistance from the United Nations and European Union.

“This is one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in American history,” he said, adding that Bush’s plan for additional troops was “painfully reminiscent of Vietnam.”

Echoing the words of Democratic Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry, Diamond mused, “How do you ask someone to be the last man or woman to die for a mistake?”

The third member of the panel, Political Science Prof. James Fearon, warned that “adding some brigades hardly brings us closer to a self-sustaining Iraq.”

Instead, he advocated a “stand-back, balance” policy that would redeploy U.S. troops to gain additional leverage with Iran and Syria.

Echoing the Iraq Study Group’s calls for redeployment of military forces in the region, Perry agreed.

“The army is dangerously close to being broken,” he said, citing interviews with top generals in Iraq who agreed that additional troops was not the answer to quell growing violence and instability in and around Baghdad.

For his part, Perry expressed hope that the growing unpopularity of the war would temper the president’s plan for deploying additional forces. The looming presidential elections in 2008, he said, could play a critical role.

“If a sufficient amount of Republicans consider that this will be disastrous,” he said, “that’s the kind of pressure we need.”