I said, some months ago (“Time To Pull the Plug,” December,
’06), that it was time for Congress to defund the war in Iraq. It has now become
apparent that’s the only way we’re going to get out of Iraq in anything
approaching a reasonable period of time In the time since I wrote that piece,
hundreds more American soldiers have died, thousands more have been permanently
disabled, and we’ve spent additional billions of dollars on this tragic, futile
war. The electorate spoke loudly and clearly last November about their antipathy
for the war. Their mistake was thinking their vote would bring an end to the
war, just as the Iraqis’ mistake was thinking that voting for a government would
actually give them a government.
The feckless Democrats have knuckled under to a Republican
autocrat, choosing to play a dangerous game of political chicken with Bush
instead of exercising their electoral prerogative. If Bush thought he was given
“political capital,” after a close election victory in ’04, Democrats were given
the bank in ’06. Yet, they’ve cowered in their corners, afraid of the political
consequences of doing what they were elected to do. What sense does that make?
And the Democrats’ excuse? We don’t have enough votes to
override a veto, they say, while they engage in pathetic maneuvering, posturing,
and worse, empty table-thumping. The only thing the Democrats can do to end the
war is the very thing they have the power to do, without worrying about whether
or not the President likes or approves of it—cut off funding. Congress has
what is so colorfully called the “power of the purse.” Under the Constitution,
Congress decides whether, and how much, to fund wars. It has the power, under
the terms of Article I, Section 8, to “raise and support armies.”
Many people may not realize that, thinking that anything
Congress does is subject to Presidential approval (through signing) or
disapproval (through veto). But the truth is, Congress can end this war, ALL BY
ITSELF. So why hasn’t it done so? Because it has bought into the spin of an
administration that enjoys one of the lowest approval ratings in history that
cutting off funding for the war is cutting off funding for the troops (even
though that is manifestly untrue). And if Congress did that they’d probably face
the folks who drive around in cars with those magnetic “Support the Troops”
stickers rising up in revolt, right? Wrong.
The Democrats have allowed Bush (and his various henchmen)
to define funding for the war as either being for “spreading democracy,”
“fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”, or being
against the troops. With the notable exception of Congressmen Martha and
Kucinich, and of late, Chris Dodd, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be
cowed by an administration whose “support” for the troops has manifested itself
in vehicles that don’t protect troops from being blown up, involuntarily
extended tours of duty and woefully inadequate health care when they leave the
military. So who’s really supporting the troops?
In addition to the “not supporting our troops” trope, the
Republicans also have their go-to talking point, namely that if troops are
withdrawn, the result will be a catastrophe. This from the same people who
claimed there were WMD’s in Iraq, that the war would be short (and cheap), that
we’d be greeted as “liberators,” and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war. In
other words, Bush and his cadre of neocon war drummers were wrong about every
single thing they predicted about the war. But now we’re supposed to believe
their prediction about what will happen when we withdraw? That defies logic.
The President’s speech on Thursday, which followed his
alter ego, General Petraeus’ dog and pony show before Congress (which revealed
that he himself can’t say that the war in Iraq is making the U.S. any safer),
revealed, at long last, his (Bush’s) true agenda. We all know that the U.S. is
building the largest embassy in the history of civilization in Iraq, and that
it’s been building permanent military bases in Iraq, so we knew Bush et al. were
planning on a long-term presence in that country. But now we know that he’s
planning on an indefinite presence, because he has finally told us so. The
“enduring relationship” he announced during his speech has been interpreted as
nothing short of the kind of commitment we’ve seen in Korea.
In other words, American troops will be stationed in Iraq
for at least the next 50 years (which is probably how long it would take to get
the Iraqi army to “stand up” anyway). Of course, Korea isn’t in the midst of a
civil war, and few, if any, American soldiers who have been stationed there for
the last 50 years have died as a result of any combat. So, in the face of
overwhelming opposition to the war, the public’s belief that American troops
should be promptly (within a year) and totally withdrawn, and an approval rating
lower than most used car salesmen have, what does the President do? Why, of
course, he calls for our troops to be permanently stationed in Iraq.
I’ve thought, for some time, that Bush has gone “Captain
Queeg” (the deranged commander of a battleship in the novel—and a role so
convincingly played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie of the same name—The Caine
Mutiny) on us, or worse, that he’s figured out how to hold us all hostage to his
insanity, while we (and especially the Democratic party) have been suffering
from a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. The sailors on the U.S.S. Caine mutinied
in order to prevent the ship from capsizing. Our ship is severely listing,
thanks to our “Captain Queeg’s” insanity. If we don’t take over control of this
ship soon, and convince the Democrats in Congress that the only way to do that
is to stop funding for the war, we may find our ship of state capsizing as well.
