Congressional Action Taken on the Iraq War

03/23/2007

Paul Munnis


Today the U.S. Congress put a “stop-loss order” on the death and injury of American troops in Iraq. The troops should be pleased, their families should be happy, and I imagine many a Pentagon Flag Officer is hoisting a cold-one in silent joy that this war finally has an end in sight. The military can now start to chart its future and rebuild.

The Iraq War has been grinding up our troop strength, sapping out Reserve and National Guard units, and wearing out our equipment. We have been staffing with poor quality recruits and it is time to get our troops back into garrison, cull out the bad apples and rebuild our military to support a new foreign policy.

For Mr. Bush, although he is grousing, he still has until the fall of 2008 to prove the worth of his surge strategy and to hand a better Iraq over to the Iraq government. It will be an Iraq free of Saddam, with an elected government, with a rebuilt Army and Police Force and with a Iraqi Constitution. Whether Iraq frees itself of killing and of sectarian civil war is up to the Iraqi’s. There is nothing America can do about that. That is a job for the Iraqi government.

If the critics are right that setting a date certain will cause the bad guys to lay low until we withdraw then that is good news. An 18 month period free of high violence levels will be a welcome respite for all hands and give the Iraqi government time to pull itself up by the bootstraps. If they are wrong, and the violence increases, then Bush will have injected 30,000 more troops into Iraq to help contain it. Either way we will be better off.

I think that Congress has done what it must and now we can get on with American life free of knowledge that we are bogged down in an endless war.

Bush will posture and demure of course but the battle between Congress and Bush is over where Iraq is concerned. Now we need to get the auditing done, take a hard look at contractors, and determine who has been helping themselves to our national treasury in the name of fighting terrorism. We also need to investigate and write the history of Guantanamo Bay, human rights violation claims, torture and abuse of POW’s, and CIA rendition. I am hopeful that a revised Patriot Act is in the wings too, one that restores American civil liberties. Finally we need to get the issue of “Separation of Powers” resolved so that the Alberto Gonzales matter can be investigated and resolved.

Twenty-one months from now Mr. Bush will be the ex-president of the United States. That will give Democrats something else to rejoice about. Until then let’s carry on with the resumption of oversight, balancing our budget by 2012, developing alternative energy sources, and righting bad legislation that was passed during the last twelve year period of GOP reign and hurting America and our people.

Terrorism will not go away because Democrats are in control of Congress but we can make darn sure that we focus our resources where they will get the best bang for the buck – something that the GOP failed to do in these last twelve years.

The talking heads on TV have been making much of the offers of money in return for voting against the War. The GOP was willing to sell their votes for this money and so that is the end of the blarney about their "principles." Clearly they can be bought as the recent vote clearly shows.

One last thing – Mr. Bush is determined to veto the Military Spending Bill when it hits his desk in mid-April. That is his prerogative but when he does then it will have been the GOP that failed to support our troops since there is money in that Bill to support our military. It is this never-ending war in Iraq that Democrats are not in support of and Democrats have put a cap on that. Mr. Bush no longer has a blank-check.

Let's keep moving on.