Will On Plan Murtha: Democrats Lack The Courage Of Their Convictions
It’s nothing that hasn’t been said here, but it’s said well, so let’s turn to George Will:
Regarding Iraq, the Democratic-controlled Congress could do what Democrats say a Democratic president would do: withdraw U.S. forces. A president could simply order that; Congress could defund military operations in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are, however, afraid to do that because they lack the courage of their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces.
So they aim to hamstring the president with restrictions on the use of the military. The restrictions ostensibly are concerned with preparedness but actually are designed to prevent deployments to Iraq.
Last Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a resolution disapproving the president’s policy because Democrats would not permit a vote on a resolution stating that the Senate will not cut off funds for troops in the field. That resolution would have committed the Senate to not taking the path that many Democrats already are tiptoeing down.
Suppose Democrats write their restrictions on the use of forces into legislation that funds the war. And suppose the president signs the legislation but ignores the restrictions, calling them unconstitutional usurpations of his powers as commander in chief. What could Democrats do? Cross First Street NE and ask the Supreme Court to compel the president to acquiesce in congressional micromanagement of a war? The court probably would refuse to get involved on the grounds that this is a “political question.”
The court has held that some constitutional controversies should be settled by the government’s political — meaning elected — branches. In 1962, the court said that a case involves a political question when there is:
” . . . textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it; or the impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion; or the impossibility of a court’s undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government; or an unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made; or the potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question.”
In that welter of criteria there are reasons that the court will not rescue congressional Democrats from facing the logic of their posturing. They lack the will to exercise their clearly constitutional power to defund the war. And they lack the power to achieve that end by usurping the commander in chief’s powers to conduct a war.
They can spend this year fecklessly and cynically enacting restrictions that do not restrict. Or they can legislate decisive failure of the Iraq operation — withdrawal — thereby acquiring conspicuous complicity in a defeat that might be inevitable anyway. A Hobson’s choice? No, Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s.
Actually, there is an aspect of Will’s reasoning that we haven’t touched on as yet: the very real possibility that Bush will simply ignore the Murtha plan, even if passed…and Will makes a persuasive case that the Supreme Court will decline to intervene…
their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces.
I beg your pardon.
Andy, you should have warned me before I clicked that link (God, that hair!)…
Mark,
Answer me this, if Democrats vote to de-fund the war, will you accuse them of not supporting the troops? Will you join in on the avalanche of talking points (which no doubt have already been developed and researched by conservatives/republicans) that will be used to manipulate public opinion into thinking that the Democrats want US soldiers fighting without proper gear and support? I can already see your rants. “Democrats hate the US and US soldiers!!! They want soldiers to die on the battlefield.” You will. You can’t make the promise because you know that you will. So, that said, who are you to judge the Democrats for looking for some cover in the face of overwhelming propaganda? Mutha’s plan is smart and scares propagandists like yourself because it limits your ability to spin their intention.
If you really think I will rant, “Democrats hate the US and US soldiers!!! They want soldiers to die on the battlefield,” then you are obviously not a regular. I know the Democrats want what’s best for their country, of course they do. I happen to think they’re wrong, and I will accuse them of just what they are doing – pulling out of Iraq prematurely, and ensuring the defeat they believe has already occurred.
I don’t have to accuse them of anti-Americanism to object to both their tactics, and the inevitable results…
Propaganda. . . indeed.
I’ve noticed that Ted Kennedy, an early and vocal voice for defunding the war in Iraq, has gone remarkably silent over the past several weeks. He is not given to keeping his mouth shut when it comes to advancing his point of view so I can only conclude that the Democrats’ leadership team have convinced him to go silent as they advance the Murtha plan.
I much prefer the honesty of Ted Kennedy over the political cover approach of Jack Murtha. I suppose these Democrats are no different than most politicians: afraid to stand up and be counted for what they truly believe.
There’s seems to be some disconnect between Democrats claiming the people elected them to get us out of Iraq, and then saying they need some political cover to secretly do what the people supposedly want them to do.
That’s a lie. No one is saying things will calm down, that all will be better over there without us. We do know that we are making the situation worse and we know that the Americans in their streets making good targets are about the only point on which both sides currently agree. The point of this is that the war was based on lies, we did what we could in spite of it, and now we’re trapped.
Trapped because, if we stay, the situation will probably not improve for a very long time and we will continue to have our own people killed and continue to enrage people who have shown they are not averse to sacrificing themselves to inflict harm on as many of us as possible but, if we leave, we will allow the slaughterhouse to expand and possibly set up a larger regional war and will have enraged people who have shown they are not averse to sacrificing themselves to inflict harm on as many of us as possible.
The GOP resolution was as meaningless as what the Dems did. No one is going to cut them off at the knees. They’ll have the money to get out safely as possible. No one is proposing to leave them twisting in the wind with no way to buy a ticket home and no way to buy what they need to defend themselves. That is a ludicrous talking point and shows, yet again, that the war in Iraq has/d nothing whatsoever to do with our safety and security and everything to do with politics (and maybe some family issues that should have never been allowed to leave the confines of a Texas Asylum for the Undeserved Wealthy and Criminally Incompetent).
As for Dems legislating failure, it’s probably too late to avoid this right-wing idiocy and I imagine we’ll hear the squeals from wingers for the next 30 years until we again get a self-aggrandizing nincompoop from the GOP in the WH who sends us into another war (or builds up a war he said he would stop that was started by a Dem who gave into all the nonsense BS about how one will be shown to be weak if they don’t have the balls to send in other people’s kids in the service to some country where they aren’t needed and that is no threat to us).
Nonetheless, Bush won the politics in 2002 and got the neocon war and has had more than enough time to get something/anything right. It is time to pull the plug because this was a bad idea from the beginning only made worse by a wholly incompetent administration. We took out both the Japanese and the Germans in about 3 and a half years when we did not have the most powerful military, or the best weapons, or a large ready force, or an oversized, overpaid military industry. Too late, game’s up, it was a loss before the first bomb dropped and we’ve only lost points since then.
The Dems cannot honestly be held responsible for defeat by calling time on something already lost. I know you harpies will moan about it as such anyway but it just goes to show your lack of honesty, your lack of logical abilities or both.
Another satisfied customer!…
“I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government?
“Would it be secular, along the lines of the Baath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. It makes no sense at all.”
- Dick Cheney, 1991
A rare moment of lucid thought from a man living inside the bunker of his own dreams. And you want your children to continue to die for him?
Jack Fackett, with all due respect, what the hell are you talking about? No one wants children to die for Dick Cheney. If you think this war is all about him, you’re sincerely blinkered…
Go read the comments on G. Will’s Op-Ed. 99.99% are negative.
Oh, big surprise…I’ve got a better idea, go read the story at the Washington Post on how the Murtha Plan is all but dead! Bwaahaaahaaa….
Yeah! Right, you Bush fanatics. You are just as bad as the Islamic fanatics: totally brainwashed. Keep on living in your fantasy world, Kool-Aid heads. The majority of sane Americans — that is the close to 70% who want our troops home pronto — is holding you responsible for every single American death or severe wound that occurs daily. Just get ready to defend your positions, you chickenhawks! You and your ilk are going to be held accountable for every death and every injury to any American soldier until every single one of them is home safe. So start working on your rationales, chickensh**s. And pray that the nation only sees you as a bunch of ideological cowards, rather than the murderers by proxy that you really are.
Every death of a US soldier is your fault, chickenhawks. Every injury to a US soldier is your fault, chickenhawks. Every death, injury, or rape, of an Iraqi civilian, is your fault, chickensh**s. May you all burn in hell. You are not fit to belong to the human race.
Hey, you’re some kind of supergenius from outerspace, aren’t you? Congratulations, you’ve discovered the chickenhawk argument!
Now run along and cure cancer, the world needs your giant brain elsewhere…
How much you want to bet that when this guy isn’t busy calling for the extermination of those who disagree with him, he’s busy calling Bush supporters “Nazies” without a hint of irony?
Um, no, no one’s made that argument at all.
If you bothered to read my blog on a regular basis, you would know how completely off the mark you are…
gil’s post at 2:27 pm.
And BINGO was its name o.
gil, first you have to ask the right question. Don’t come around here asking what the ‘Right Wing’ policy is on Iraq. I speak for myself only, and I’m hardly a fire-breather. I’ve taken al-Maliki and his coziness to Iran to task on many, many occasions; he worries me, too.
Nevertheless, he represents an elected, not an appointed government, so deal with him we must – I’m sure you don’t advocate a coup or an assassination, and neither do I.
My own preference is that we give the surge until at least late summer to show results. The results I would like to see are (a) a vastly improved security posture in Baghdad, and (b) political movement towards a more inclusive Iraqi government.
We have little control over (b), but it seems to me the surge can help immensely with (a).
Our long-term goal is absolutely a democracy in Iraq – why do you find that so hard to believe? We may not achieve it, but it’s certainly an admirable goal…please don’t tell me you buy that hokum about the war being for oil, etc., etc…
I agree with some things you say, disagree with others vehemently – most prominently, your assertion that Bush would give Iraq to Iran and wouldn’t care because it wouldn’t happen on his watch.
That’s just not the case. Surely you realize every president tries to do what’s best for America. He may be wrong, but to question his motives in this way is to engage in a cartoonish view of your political opposition…
gil, obviously no one’s going to be able to get you to shake your cynicism, so I’m not going to try; you’re committed to your viewpoint. Fair enough.
However, you should be careful about what lessons you take from history. Normandy was not a “surprise” in any sense. The Germans knew it was coming. In fact, the only real surprise was that the Allies convinced the Germans that more soldiers were coming, in the form of the notional First US Army Group (FUSAG) under the leadership of Patton.
No such army group existed, but Allied counterintelligence did a fair job of convincing the Germans it did. That helped lead to the German impression that the Normandy landings were a feint, which is one of the reasons Hitler held back his Panzer divisions when the Allies were most vulnerable.
As for the influence of Iran on the Iraqi Shia, that is a danger, no doubt. However, I think your analysis, which makes the Iraqi Shia mere puppets of Iran, is simplistic, and you also have to recognize that the notion that a majority-Shia state would continue to exist under brutal Sunni rule indefinitely is untenable. It’s as foolish as thinking South Africa could live under white domination forever. The Sunni/Shia fight was coming, no matter what Bush or any other American president did.
Now you can argue we should stay out of it and let them kill each other, and there’s something to that notion. But as for the idea that we have inflamed the Shia and/or the Sunni with our presence, it was clear long before Iraq there were plenty of Muslims of both sects who furiously rejected us no matter what we did, because we represent a culture of modernity which they find an offense to God.
The best bet for making a change in that dynamic is setting up a true Arab democracy. The Iraq War wasn’t a question of “destabilizing” the Middle East; it’s been unstable for decades, and steadily getting worse. There are some legitimate questions about whether we’ve done enough to helping a democracy get started, especially in the realm of establishing the security needed for civil society, and there are also some legitimate questions about establishing the virtues of democracy in a society where enlightenment values are scarce. But the reality of Iraq was that it was already a disaster before the invasion. Upending Saddam’s regime was about it’s only chance of recovering.