Letters to the Editor
DCLaw1
Published Letters: 996 Editor's Choice: 2
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"supporting the troops [war]"
[Read the article: The D.C. establishment versus American public opinion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm watching my recording of today's Meet the Press, and I just heard Joe Biden repeat the canard that cutting off war funding would do nothing but hurt the troops.
Sometimes I wish Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and those other "pre-911" thinkers could materialize for just long enough to slap Biden around for throwing Article I of the Constitution in the trash.
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kinfalk
[Read the article: The D.C. establishment versus American public opinion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As long as we are on Bush's topic, it's all about him.
And that's what the little narcissist wants, isn't it?
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That a lame duck is getting away with setting the topic of discussion is more than absurd...it's catastrophic.
The Democrats' formulation - for better or for worse - is the exact converse. Some time ago, the Democrats in Congress were faced with a pivotal fork in the road. Do they work tirelessly to put an unequivocal end to the occupation (risking, in their eyes, the "stabbed in the back" millstone), or do they protest and complain about the occupation but do nothing substantively to stop it, hoping that anger over Iraq will overwhelm the 2008 election and ensure that a Democrat wins?
They have clearly chosen the latter. They have a triangulating eye toward 2008, the presidential election. Notice the narrative already threaded throughout many of their statements: at the end of the day, it is the President's call, not Congress' (a dubious proposition at best), and if you want an end to this war, elect a Democrat to the presidency.
The fundamental and existential risk of this formulation, of course, is that the Democrats could just as easily end up "owning" the occupation as much as the Republicans, and they provide Republicans significant cover for staying the course in some form or another. They also risk alienating - indeed, have already alienated - their core constituencies, and pulling down their approval numbers due to such alienation, resulting in a false media narrative that the public distrusts "extremes of both sides," and that an antiwar position is still an extreme position. After all, Republicans say (McCain said it most recently), if Democrats in Congress can't even stand up for ending the occupation, then desiring to end the occupation must be oh-so radical and unserious (poll numbers proving the opposite be damned).
The Democrats, in other words, have made a craven and unprincipled calculation, not realizing that taking bold legislative steps to withdraw our troops would in fact strengthen their image as leaders in the eyes of the public, energize their very important base, and still keep Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 election, to their benefit. The biggest thing keeping them from realizing these truths is their mindless internalization of the GOP talking point that conditioning funding on withdrawal would somehow "endanger the troops." The reason for this internalization, and an independent reason for their political choices, is the presence of a significant number of hawks and "moderates" in their midst, and the residual conditioning that when a Republican waves a flag, they must sit down and shut up.
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rustcrumb
[Read the article: The D.C. establishment versus American public opinion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn, you say that "nothing justifies our ongoing occupation" of Iraq. I'm far from an expert on the situation, but what do you think would happen if the US forces disappeared from Iraq tomorrow?
I think it becomes clearer by the day that our presence there is only postponing an inevitable sectarian meltdown - and may in fact be building the pressure and suppressed rage that is bound to explode eventually. This being the greatest likelihood, the question then becomes what is the utility of wasting immense blood and treasure to delay the inevitable, particularly when the ostensible goal is a single state government that attempts to hold together a sectarian tinderbox that was previously kept pacified only by the most draconian dictatorship.
No question things will get worse when (not if) we leave. The only question is how much money and how many lives we throw into the hungry void before things collapse, and whether we instead swallow some of our inflated pride to make the very sober and necessary realization that the stability of that region depends entirely on the participation of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other regional players.
Attempting to pull some sanity from the mess we've already made will require a fundamental shift in our foreign policy - to cease demonizing the Shiite world and convince all countries in that region that a broader conflagration is against everyone's interests. This may also require abandoning the colonial-era notion of a single Iraqi state, and learning to cope with a necessary inability to command political outcomes there.
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thedeanpeople
[Read the article: The D.C. establishment versus American public opinion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If there is something other than impeachment that qualifies as non-masturbatory, I think it's long past time that even the vaunted netroots need to describe it in tangible terms. Either that or admit that they're just carping about having to occupy the bench seats in the Euphemedia Peanut Gallery.
If Congress' unequivocally cutting off funding or conditioning funds on withdrawal wouldn't stop the President from doing what he pleases (according to you), then why exactly would impeachment?
This line of argument is facile but illusory. Constitutionally, the legislature's power of the purse is at least as powerful as the power of impeachment.