19
Feb
Presidents’ Day Political Observations
Topic: Politics
Update: After writing this post I came across retired General William Odom’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post, and the transcript of his recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show. I highly recommend both. Hewitt is a strong supporter of Bush’s handling of Iraq, and it’s quite amazing to see how efficiently and convincingly Odom demolished Hewitt’s arguments.
This will be my first post since we arrived in Japan that’s not about Japan. Thanks to the “series of tubes” that make up the internet I’ve been keeping up with US politics from here. I’d like to share some thoughts on a few foreign policy matters.
- First, since it’s Presidents’ Day in the US, here are some wise words from Abraham Lincoln that I came across recently. Even though Congress is in no mood to authorize military action against Iran, there are strong indications the Bush administration is nonetheless seriously considering some kind of military strike, so these are words worth keeping in mind:
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.’
The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
- Abraham Lincoln, letter to William H. Herndon, Feb. 15, 1848 (Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, had written him arguing that the president as commander-in-chief possessed the right to initiate a war against Mexico without specific Congressional authorization)
- Both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have behaved shamefully in the current Iraq debate (with a few exceptions: namely Feingold, for recognizing the pointlessness of the anti-surge resolution, Biden, for actually offering a plan of his own, and Hagel and Snowe, for trying to keep the Senate in session until a vote was taken). After years of hammering the Democrats for “up or down” votes in the Senate (where the minority party can block votes), the Republicans have blocked a vote on the Democrats anti-surge resolution. By blocking the vote, the Republicans avoid having to go on record one way or the other as to whether they support the President.
At the same time, this non-binding anti-surge resolution is at most a side-show. In the latest AP poll, 63% of Americans favor “setting a time-table for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of next year,” yet we are not anywhere near having our Congress debate this question. Instead, the Senate has been debating whether to have a debate on a non-binding resolution saying they don’t very much like the President’s plan to send more troops.
Despite the Democrats’ decisive victory in November, which was largely based on the public’s frustration with the Iraq war, they are still driven by fear more than principle. Fear of being hit with the “endangering the troops” line if they write a withdrawal timetable into law (i.e. defunding Bush’s open-ended commitment), and fear of having to take responsibility for the outcome, good or bad, if they force the President’s hand. Bush has made it abundantly clear that he will never willingly take our troops out of Iraq, so if the Democrats want to do something meaningful, they have to go after the money. That doesn’t mean pulling the rug out from under troops in the field, but it does mean developing and taking responsibility for an alternate plan.
The Democrats fears are illustrated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comment that they don’t want to debate funding the war because “If you did have this vote, the radical left would eat every Democratic hopeful for president alive.” Graham and other Republicans are hoping that the Democrats won’t notice that it’s not just the “radical left” that wants the US involvement in Iraq to end in the foreseeable future, it’s a clear majority of Americans. The Democrats have yet to figure this one out. They also haven’t figured out the absurd “defunding the war means endangering the troops” canard, which has become a common Republican talking point and is quickly becoming conventional wisdom. As Glenn Greenwald states:
This unbelievably irrational, even stupid, concept has arisen and has now taken root — that to cut off funds for the war means that, one day, our troops are going to be in the middle of a vicious fire-fight and suddenly they will run out of bullets — or run out of gas or armor — because Nancy Pelosi refused to pay for the things they need to protect themselves, and so they are going to find themselves in the middle of the Iraq war with no supplies and no money to pay for what they need. That is just one of those grossly distorting, idiotic myths the media allows to become immovably lodged in our political discourse and which infects our political analysis and prevents any sort of rational examination of our options.
That is why virtually all political figures run away as fast and desperately as possible from the idea of de-funding a war — it’s as though they have to strongly repudiate de-funding options because de-funding has become tantamount to “endangering our troops” (notwithstanding the fact that Congress has de-funded wars in the past and it is obviously done in coordination with the military and over a scheduled time frame so as to avoid “endangering the troops”).
- Steven Clemons at the Washington Note has been closely following the unfolding story of the 2003 overture from Iran on reaching a “grand bargain” with the US, which the US completely ignored. It appears to have been a very serious offer, and it “[put] on the table such issues as an end to Iran’s support for anti-Israeli militants, action against terrorist groups on Iranian soil and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.” Exactly how the offer was buried is turning out to be a somewhat bizarre story.
It looks like Powell shelved it because he was deep in working on the North Korea issue, which was the only policy area he had much control over, as his influence in the Bush administration was on the wane at this point. Since his more traditional diplomatic approach did not square with the ascendant neocon vision of Cheney and Rumsfeld, he concluded that if he tried to push for diplomacy with North Korea and Iran at the same time, he would end up shut out of both completely. So he sacrificed possible progress on Iran in favor of hoping to make progress with North Korea.
And what of Condi Rice? She claims she knew nothing about it, but a former member of her National Security Council says that she must have known about it. And it’s recently been confirmed that Karl Rove and congressman Bob Ney knew about it. Either way this is very bad for Condi Rice: she’s either being dishonest, or - despite being the National Security Advisor at the time - she was considered such a weak or irrelevant player that others were able to keep her out of the loop.
The larger point here is this is more evidence of Bush’s failed “CEO Model” of the Presidency. The CEO model only works when the President is strong enough to keep his cabinet in line, working toward common goals. Instead, each member of his cabinet has pursued his or her own agenda, often in conflict with others, and the national interest has been lost in the shuffle.
- I will leave you with another Presidential quote. This one is from Teddy Roosevelt, writing during another war:
[The President] should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
- President Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in his essay “Lincoln and Free Speech”
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