This week, President Bush vetoed a bill that would provide funding for the Iraqi war, but tied the funding to a timetable for troop withdrawal. In rejecting the bill, Bush said that “setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible.” He sent the bill back to Congress, with the threat that he would veto any war funding bill that includes a timetable. So here we go again; as soldiers get shot at in Iraq, His Majesty George W enters another game of chicken with the Democrats.
The newspapers today are saying that Congress is regrouping to rewrite the bill. I wish they wouldn’t. There is no need to compromise with this man.
I don’t think Congress owes it to the President to give him a spending bill of his liking. It is Bush who owes the American people a full explanation for why he does not think he can wrap things up in Iraq between now and next October (the withdrawal deadline specified in the bill). Eighteen months is a long time for a military action, and Bush in his recalcitrance is indicating that he cannot get the job done in that length of time. He put a lot of time and effort into explaining to everyone why we needed to invade Iraq in the first place. The least he can do now is explain — honestly, this time — why he can’t get out.
I say leave him on the hook. Congress should tell the president that he has gotten his spending bill already and rejected it. If he wants a different one he had better explain why. Otherwise, he can forget it.
He has been playing this my-way-or-no-way game since Inauguration 2001. It doesn’t fly any more. For a president who talks all the time about accountability, he doesn’t seem to care for it much when he is the one held to account. But no one else is exempt from performance standards. If I have to live with performance standards, if the cook at McDonalds’s has to live with them, the Commander and Chief of the United States can live with them too.
The Bush apologist argument that refusing to compromise means cutting the troops off from proper funding is a blatant lie. Congress gave Bush the money. He wouldn’t take it because he is too proud to submit to oversight.
The second objection, that setting a timetable is the same as giving the enemy a blueprint of our battle plan, holds no water either. In the first place, the “enemy” is not one but several, and the “enemies” in Iraq are not fighting us nearly as much as they are fighting each other. The only thing a timetable does is increase the pressure on the Iraqi government to stand on its own two feet and stop depending on U.S. forces to maintain order. Besides, the timetable is not necessarily set in stone. If the president would agree to one in principle, and then events prevented him from meeting the milestones, I think Congress would agree to extensions. Congressional leadership is not trying to undermine military activity in Iraq; it is trying to make military action more efficient by establishing firm goals. This beats the listless “we’re making progress” nonsense we have gotten out of the White House for the last four years. What Congress and the American people want is good faith. They want to hear their president say he will do his best to get out by the end of his term.
But he won’t do that. He won’t even admit informally that setting goals is a good idea. If he is so terribly concerned that a published timetable would compromise the Iraq mission, he could meet with Congress privately and come up with a secret plan for withdrawal. If Congressional leaders and the president publicly announced that they had agreed to a timetable but would keep it secret for security reasons, I would accept that. But even this is not on the table. His current plan is to stay in Iraq however long it takes. In other words, he has no plan.
My political attitudes lean towards moderation. Even when I do not have a moderate view, I sympathize with people willing to search for middle ground. Compromise is a very difficult thing to do, and no one ever gives compromisers credit. The very word compromise implies failure or weakness. Yet compromise is absolutely necessary in society— everyone cannot have his way.
Until very recently, I agreed with the middle ground people who felt that the war is going badly, but we cannot get out. I felt that, as bad as things have gone so far, we produced the instability in Iraq and have a responsibility to get things under control before we leave. Last week, though, I changed my mind when I read that the U.S. is now building walls in Baghdad to separate warring communities. The wall-building story was barely noted in the media, but to me it represents a watershed moment in our Iraqi occupation. You build walls between communities when you have given up hope that the communities will ever get along. You build walls when diplomacy and peaceful efforts have totally failed. You build walls when you have run out of ideas. To me, the walls are a clear indication that the Bush White House has no idea when the suicide bombs will stop, or when the shooting will end.
What kind of a strategy for establishing peace is permanently dividing communities? It would be like Southern leaders saying, “Well, blacks and whites just can’t seem to get along. So let’s separate black and white communities and wall them off from one another. It worked before!”
Walls are the beginning of apartheid. That is the Bush administration’s best thinking on Iraq — apartheid. Separate one faction from the other. One group will prosper faster than the other. The richer group, threatened by its poorer neighbors, will then manipulate the political system to keep the poor people from getting stronger. That is what apartheid is — a rich group insuring its success by keeping its competition down. That is what walls give you, every time.
Since the current plan to establish peace in Iraq is to build walls, I feel comfortable in saying that we will never do any good there. Since we cannot make things better, the best approach is a steady and organized withdrawal. This now seems to me perfectly straightforward. Even the most ardent Bush backer has to admit that there is a chance that we will not be able to establish stability in Iraq. Some things simply cannot be done. I don’t care how smart or how strong you are, you can’t put a broken egg back in the shell. At the very least, we need to entertain the possibility that the damage done in Iraq is irreparable. George W. Bush seems to be thinking along these lines. After all, he is building walls in Baghdad instead of getting communities to work together.
This is why the presidential veto this week makes no sense. If the war is going so badly that it is time to partition cities into war zones, it makes sense to explore solutions with Congress. Instead, the White House has rejected every opportunity to compromise. In February, Congress passed a non-binding resolution asking for a withdrawal timetable. That was ignored. In fact, Bush supporters derided the resolution, arguing that Congress showed a lack of courage in making the resolution non-binding. The current bill, coming three months later, is a follow-up to the resolution. It turned a non-binding suggestion into a requirement. In between the two events, the president had three months to find common ground. For three months he did nothing but posture. Congress should not reward such irresponsibility with a friendlier bill.
Democratic leaders need to be careful; Bush has a history of luring the opposition into compromise and then beating them to death for waffling. It is likely that if Congress compromises now, Bush will sign the bill and then issue a signing statement declaring that the new legislation allows him to do whatever he wants. He has interpreted over 750 other bills he has signed into law as the right to expand executive power. Of course he will do it again.
George W. Bush started this war. Since he started the war, finding the money for it is his problem. If he is so concerned about getting funding with no strings attached, he devote a lot more time to explaining why he, when given unlimited funds with no questions asked for four years, has turned in such unacceptable results.
If a plan is not working, you change it. If four years without an exit plan gets us where we are, you get an exit plan. If Bush can’t explain how he plans to get out of Iraq, he shouldn’t get the money. Does this mean we are putting the troops at risk? Only if you think giving unlimited funds to a leader with no plan and no accountability makes the troops safer. Under no circumstances will I submit to the idiotic argument that, in opposing a war that was fought for non-existent WMDs and that was incompetently and corruptly managed from the start, I am setting us up for defeat. We are assured of defeat as long as the Man in Charge thinks he can fight a war without accountability.
Mr. Bush, when you submit to accountability, you get your money. Not before.*
* This, by the way, is precisely what the Bush administration has been telling Katrina survivors.
The newspapers today are saying that Congress is regrouping to rewrite the bill. I wish they wouldn’t. There is no need to compromise with this man.
I don’t think Congress owes it to the President to give him a spending bill of his liking. It is Bush who owes the American people a full explanation for why he does not think he can wrap things up in Iraq between now and next October (the withdrawal deadline specified in the bill). Eighteen months is a long time for a military action, and Bush in his recalcitrance is indicating that he cannot get the job done in that length of time. He put a lot of time and effort into explaining to everyone why we needed to invade Iraq in the first place. The least he can do now is explain — honestly, this time — why he can’t get out.
I say leave him on the hook. Congress should tell the president that he has gotten his spending bill already and rejected it. If he wants a different one he had better explain why. Otherwise, he can forget it.
He has been playing this my-way-or-no-way game since Inauguration 2001. It doesn’t fly any more. For a president who talks all the time about accountability, he doesn’t seem to care for it much when he is the one held to account. But no one else is exempt from performance standards. If I have to live with performance standards, if the cook at McDonalds’s has to live with them, the Commander and Chief of the United States can live with them too.
The Bush apologist argument that refusing to compromise means cutting the troops off from proper funding is a blatant lie. Congress gave Bush the money. He wouldn’t take it because he is too proud to submit to oversight.
The second objection, that setting a timetable is the same as giving the enemy a blueprint of our battle plan, holds no water either. In the first place, the “enemy” is not one but several, and the “enemies” in Iraq are not fighting us nearly as much as they are fighting each other. The only thing a timetable does is increase the pressure on the Iraqi government to stand on its own two feet and stop depending on U.S. forces to maintain order. Besides, the timetable is not necessarily set in stone. If the president would agree to one in principle, and then events prevented him from meeting the milestones, I think Congress would agree to extensions. Congressional leadership is not trying to undermine military activity in Iraq; it is trying to make military action more efficient by establishing firm goals. This beats the listless “we’re making progress” nonsense we have gotten out of the White House for the last four years. What Congress and the American people want is good faith. They want to hear their president say he will do his best to get out by the end of his term.
But he won’t do that. He won’t even admit informally that setting goals is a good idea. If he is so terribly concerned that a published timetable would compromise the Iraq mission, he could meet with Congress privately and come up with a secret plan for withdrawal. If Congressional leaders and the president publicly announced that they had agreed to a timetable but would keep it secret for security reasons, I would accept that. But even this is not on the table. His current plan is to stay in Iraq however long it takes. In other words, he has no plan.
My political attitudes lean towards moderation. Even when I do not have a moderate view, I sympathize with people willing to search for middle ground. Compromise is a very difficult thing to do, and no one ever gives compromisers credit. The very word compromise implies failure or weakness. Yet compromise is absolutely necessary in society— everyone cannot have his way.
Until very recently, I agreed with the middle ground people who felt that the war is going badly, but we cannot get out. I felt that, as bad as things have gone so far, we produced the instability in Iraq and have a responsibility to get things under control before we leave. Last week, though, I changed my mind when I read that the U.S. is now building walls in Baghdad to separate warring communities. The wall-building story was barely noted in the media, but to me it represents a watershed moment in our Iraqi occupation. You build walls between communities when you have given up hope that the communities will ever get along. You build walls when diplomacy and peaceful efforts have totally failed. You build walls when you have run out of ideas. To me, the walls are a clear indication that the Bush White House has no idea when the suicide bombs will stop, or when the shooting will end.
What kind of a strategy for establishing peace is permanently dividing communities? It would be like Southern leaders saying, “Well, blacks and whites just can’t seem to get along. So let’s separate black and white communities and wall them off from one another. It worked before!”
Walls are the beginning of apartheid. That is the Bush administration’s best thinking on Iraq — apartheid. Separate one faction from the other. One group will prosper faster than the other. The richer group, threatened by its poorer neighbors, will then manipulate the political system to keep the poor people from getting stronger. That is what apartheid is — a rich group insuring its success by keeping its competition down. That is what walls give you, every time.
Since the current plan to establish peace in Iraq is to build walls, I feel comfortable in saying that we will never do any good there. Since we cannot make things better, the best approach is a steady and organized withdrawal. This now seems to me perfectly straightforward. Even the most ardent Bush backer has to admit that there is a chance that we will not be able to establish stability in Iraq. Some things simply cannot be done. I don’t care how smart or how strong you are, you can’t put a broken egg back in the shell. At the very least, we need to entertain the possibility that the damage done in Iraq is irreparable. George W. Bush seems to be thinking along these lines. After all, he is building walls in Baghdad instead of getting communities to work together.
This is why the presidential veto this week makes no sense. If the war is going so badly that it is time to partition cities into war zones, it makes sense to explore solutions with Congress. Instead, the White House has rejected every opportunity to compromise. In February, Congress passed a non-binding resolution asking for a withdrawal timetable. That was ignored. In fact, Bush supporters derided the resolution, arguing that Congress showed a lack of courage in making the resolution non-binding. The current bill, coming three months later, is a follow-up to the resolution. It turned a non-binding suggestion into a requirement. In between the two events, the president had three months to find common ground. For three months he did nothing but posture. Congress should not reward such irresponsibility with a friendlier bill.
Democratic leaders need to be careful; Bush has a history of luring the opposition into compromise and then beating them to death for waffling. It is likely that if Congress compromises now, Bush will sign the bill and then issue a signing statement declaring that the new legislation allows him to do whatever he wants. He has interpreted over 750 other bills he has signed into law as the right to expand executive power. Of course he will do it again.
George W. Bush started this war. Since he started the war, finding the money for it is his problem. If he is so concerned about getting funding with no strings attached, he devote a lot more time to explaining why he, when given unlimited funds with no questions asked for four years, has turned in such unacceptable results.
If a plan is not working, you change it. If four years without an exit plan gets us where we are, you get an exit plan. If Bush can’t explain how he plans to get out of Iraq, he shouldn’t get the money. Does this mean we are putting the troops at risk? Only if you think giving unlimited funds to a leader with no plan and no accountability makes the troops safer. Under no circumstances will I submit to the idiotic argument that, in opposing a war that was fought for non-existent WMDs and that was incompetently and corruptly managed from the start, I am setting us up for defeat. We are assured of defeat as long as the Man in Charge thinks he can fight a war without accountability.
Mr. Bush, when you submit to accountability, you get your money. Not before.*
* This, by the way, is precisely what the Bush administration has been telling Katrina survivors.