I think it’s great that congressional Democrats managed to keep their redeployment language in the military appropriations bills they passed this week. It’s a shame that the language won’t actually accomplish anything material even if Bush doesn’t veto the bills.
I’m not talking about the president’s insistence that he isn’t bound by laws he doesn’t like, or suggesting that the administration would find an Iran-Contra style solution to the problem of funding the war — not because I think those paths are off limits, but because they’re unnecessary. Bush may veto the eventual bill out of petulance or on the principle that Congress can’t tell him what to do, assuming that distinction can be made and that the reconciled version retains the redeployment language, but he doesn’t need to.
That’s because the bills don’t specify which troops would have to be withdrawn by sometime next year, presumably because that would constitute “micromanaging” the military; instead, they specify only which troops needn’t be withdrawn. Those include anyone protecting US or coalition personnel and facilities, anyone training Iraqi personnel, anyone engaged in counter-terrorism operations and anyone supporting the troops executing those missions. If I had to guess, I’d say that those activities will turn out to require something in the neighborhood of 130,000 troops, give or take 20%.
Maybe the bills represent a political triumph for Democrats heading into the 2008 elections. I’m not certain the strategy won’t backfire once the electorate realize that nothing much is changing, at least not for the better, but with more than a year during which even the most lackadaisical oversight from congressional Democrats will yield an unending stream of administration perfidies, a GOP comeback isn’t likely regardless what happens with Iraq.
Where the lack of action may be helpful for a potential Democratic president is in closing off options. Barring a miracle, Iraq in 18 months will be considerably more troubled than Iraq today. Another thousand or more US troops will have died; not that anyone in politics seems to genuinely care, so will tens of thousands more Iraqis. If a Democrat wins the White House, even a hawkish, Hillary Clinton-like one, he or she will have been handed a non-negotiable mandate to wind the war down in a hurry.
That’s if nothing else changes. That’s if an unanticipated outbreak of sanity infects the White House and we don’t wind up attacking Iran or scooting off on some other military adventure — we haven’t even begun to explore Africa’s potential as a quagmire, for instance — that makes withdrawing from Iraq more complicated than it already promises to be.
Supporters of the legislation will argue that even if it has no near-term impact on the administration’s conduct of the war, it represents the beginning of an incremental process. They’ll say that when the administration flouts this effort, the backlash will make enacting more effectual legislation that much easier.
But it doesn’t, and it won’t. What it may do is bring closer the game of chicken I predicted last year and that a number of people think has already commenced, in which the administration’s plans run up against a funding wall and someone, Congress or the president, has to blink or risk stranding 150,000 troops in Iraq with no money.
But it probably won’t even do that. There are at least a few Senate Democrats who will run away from any legislation that sets actual timetables for withdrawal and imposes actual restrictions on the administration. In the unlikely event that such a bill actually passes and isn’t vetoed, the administration will invoke the claimed privilege of ignoring it. If it is vetoed it won’t be overridden, and if it is overridden the administration will find the money elsewhere. So we might see a Constitutional crisis sometime next year — one that wouldn’t be resolved before the presidential election and would lose meaning afterward — but we won’t be seeing any significant withdrawal of US troops from Iraq before 2009.
The president will probably refrain from vetoing the bill; he’ll just attach a signing statement that negates the already toothless redeployment language, and bet that Democrats won’t impeach him for it. It’s a safe bet. In a way it’s a win for both sides: Bush and Cheney get to keep on keepin’ on and the Democrats [probably] get to exploit the situation at the polls. The only guaranteed losers are the people whose lives are ended or ruined in the meantime.
Ain’t politics grand?
Oh great, another signing statement.
One thing, there has been a detectable increase in optimism on the war from careful surge marketing by BushCo and idiotic neocons. These upticks in public support have occurred before – during the elections, when the government was formed, when Dubya farted in a particularly coherent way…
However, each uptick in support has been smashed down by the horrible reality that Iraq is a FUBAR wrapped in an enigma. The surge failing – even in Baghdad. And Tel Afar, one of Dubya’s model cities, is back to pure mayhem.
The point of this polemic is that a number of these craven pols who have supported BushCo throughout will start peeling off as election day nears, and the futility of the surge becomes more apparent. At that time, look for ever tougher measures by congress to reign in the madman.
–Ron
http://revolttoday.blogspot.com/
Yes, politics is “grand.” You are correct that not much will change for the U.S. in Iraq until the election of a new president. No legislation will effectively end the war during the remainder of the Bush Administration. However, if vetoed as expected, the supplemental funding bill should leave the Republican Party with sole responsibility for the eventual failure of the President’s Iraq War “strategies.” In fact, I think that the veto would help relegate republicans to complete minority status, as the American electorate resoundingly repudiates the failed policies of the Bush Administration in the next election. A veto would help to absolve the Democratic Party of responsibility for the continued fighting and pressures republican members of Congress to make a hard choice. By “deferring” to the president’s (surge) plan to continue the fight, the Republican members of Congress will be disappointing the majority of their constituents and thus will be vulnerable to challengers opposed to continuing the war. And President Bush and the Republican Party will be blamed for “losing” the Iraq War, just as President Johnson and the Democratic Party took the blame for the Vietnam War. What goes around comes around, again.