Most of us now agree about most things on Iraq. Most of us know that the original given reason for going to war, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, has melted away. Most of us believe American forces can’t stay in Iraq much longer given the status quo. Most of us don’t want an instant withdrawal, but a slower maneuver that can keep us safe and, if possible, still leave some measure of lasting stability behind us. Most of us feel Iraq is a tragedy, and could have gone better, and might have even been a good thing, and is a source of profound national sadness and shame.

This consensus is an odd thing to realize, because every day we hear that the war is “bitterly dividing” us. Is it really? Or is it simply bitterly dividing our political class, caught between feeling they have to express either Cheney-esque gung-ho optimism or pure anti-war rage?

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Israel on a media trip with the American Israel Education Foundation. The country is still grappling with this summer’s war in Lebanon which unlike ours, is over; but like ours, didn’t go according to plan. But the rhetoric there couldn’t be more different from here: All the politicians we journalists talked to, be they right-wing or left-wing, unanimously expressed a dark, fearful feeling about the country’s future: They worried Iran would soon have a nuclear weapon, they doubted any possibilities for peace with the Palestinians in the next decades, they condemned their prime minister’s weakness, and they didn’t pretend a hostile press had lost their war for them: They agreed that, indeed, it had gone terribly wrong.

The country seemed to be, in fact, almost in a state of clinical depression. If countries were people, we’d think of America as more mentally and emotionally healthy than Israel. Occasionally delusional, perhaps. A bit conflicted inside, maybe. But possessing a fundamentally upbeat outlook. Full of “positive energy.” Better self-esteem. This is what some people are talking about when they speak of “American exceptionalism”: Very high national self-esteem that generally doesn’t admit the kind of brooding moods currently gripping the Holy Land.

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But is it right to judge our national feeling the way we judge our personal feelings, or model our political discourse after the conventions of “constructive” emotions?

I deal from time to time with politicians on the Hill, and most of them are more thoughtful, and subtle, and well-intentioned than we imagine them to be — probably more well-intentioned, on the whole, than Israeli politicians, who have recently become notorious for their corruption. (The day I got to Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came under investigation for influence-peddling.)

But it was so refreshing for me to speak to Israeli politicians for a change, because they are uniformly blunt; they talk openly; they express human things like remorse and worry and ambivalence and sorrow and shame that let us know that the other things they express-the moments of rah-rah optimism, or the determination — are true.

Such blunt political openness also deflates the desperate need not to lose face that drives so many actions in Washington. In D.C. over the next few weeks, congressional Democrats and Republicans will try to find some course of action to adopt on Iraq. But they’re working within a whole stew of image problems: Some can’t look like they believe we could lose, others need to demonstrate a healthy amount of outrage to please their more anti-war constituencies, and so on. Wouldn’t it be better if we just acknowledged the current beliefs I described above — and the terrible difficulties in trying to find a good solution? Do we in Washington really believe American citizens are such children that they can’t understand the complexities of situations, and have to be shown a proper game face, like when you’re little and somebody has died, but you aren’t ready yet to know what death is, so Daddy can’t let you see him cry?

I’ve written in this space before that politicians should more often say “I’m sorry.” It’s important not to take this openness too far: Good leaders must, in some fundamental way, be reassuring. But at the risk of being mocked for being a touchy-feely wimp, I’d like American politicians — like Israelis do — to be able to say “I’m scared” once in a while. It only sounds silly because we aren’t used to it.

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.