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| Iraq |
| Undeclaring War |
| 2007-02-27 |
| The question of whether the Democrats will be able to edit and amend the 2002 Iraq war resolution is one of those constitutional conundrums that comes along once every quarter millennium or so. The majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has already expressed enthusiasm for the idea, as has Senator Clinton. On Sunday, the Senate's commander in chief, Carl Levin, slithered onto "Meet the Press" to announce that he's working with Senator Biden on a new mission statement for GIs in Iraq. Our troops, Mr. Levin said, will be "in a supporting role rather than a combat role in Iraq." Mr. Levin assured his viewers that Congress can impose a "cap on the number of troops," but when pressed, he would not take the bait and actually give a number. "We can cap the number of troops, change the mission without cutting off funding for the troops. ... We are not going to repeat the mistake of Vietnam where we took out on the troops our differences of policy with the administration." And there you have the Democrats a year and eight months before the election. If this kind of posturing were not so dangerous it would be humorous. Here are the Democrats, finally registering the displeasure of the far-left base with the Iraq war, by proposing essentially that President Bush return to the old Iraq strategy that they insisted throughout 2006 he change. Scaling back the mission of American soldiers in Iraq to the point where they train Iraq's national army is now the one war strategy that everyone can agree has failed. The Democrats seem to have forgotten — or worse, to be repressing — the fact that those Iraqi units that we trained in Jordan proved both incapable and unwilling to protect the Sunni minority from the rampages of Shiite militias. This was because many of these same units we trained were themselves more loyal to the sectarian goals of the militias than they were to a unified Iraq. Mr. Bush is way ahead of the senators; the new strategy will embed our soldiers inside the Iraqi units. The idea is that this will contribute to a more effective military effort, while giving our own GIs a more intimate comprehension of the situation. If this works, then block by block, Baghdadis will start to get some peace. This is what General Petraeus, the man Mr. Levin's own committee sent unanimously to Iraq, has been saying. So it takes quite a bit of chutzpah for Mr. Levin, who had not a bad word for the general when the general appeared before his panel, to be now spending his energies on a new resolution to second-guess him. As Americans puzzle over the spectacle of the Democrats' behavior, they will find solace in the writings of the Founders and the commentators on them. Joseph Story, for one, wrote of how, at Philadelphia, the first draft of the Constitution delegated to Congress the power merely "to make war," but it was later changed to "declare war." It was proposed to add, at one point, the power "to make peace," but that was rejected — unanimously, Story pointed out — because that would come only with the process of treaty making. The Founders, it seemed, just never could imagine a perfidy like the one we are witnessing today in which our national legislature would seek to quit a fight without having won. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 ...It's occurring to me that the Democrats really have painted themselves into a corner. The cutting-off-funds option terrifies them because it will take weeks at most for Iraq to implode into a failed state far worse than Afghanistan ever was, and there'll be more than a year for the Republicans to remind the voters whodunit. Everything else - the cap, the time limit, and any other harebrained ideas they've got - can pretty much be ignored by the White House. If Congress invokes the War Powers Act (and that's far from a certainty), the WPA stands an excellent chance of being cut to ribbons in SCOTUS. Clearly one side did its homework while the other seems to believe that the Wayback Machine has sent us all back to 1972. Seems to me the situation was best described by another Democrat, one from Texas, a long time ago: "... "I can't run, I can't hide and I can't make it go away." Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2007-02-27 09:02 |
| #1 Just for the record, ever check up on how the US settled its Declaration of War against Germany in 1917? Remember the US Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-02-27 06:47 |