Another Holiday

It's funny, you quit paying attention to politics for a week and a lot of things can happen. After playing a little catch-up, the one that surprised and disappointed me most was not the non-story coming from the immunized testimony of Monica Goodling (or the reportedly haphazard approach the Dems took on the HJC), nor was it the rapidly diminishing thud of a Senate intel report dropped on the public on a Friday before a long weekend, a report whose existence will likely be forgotten in the media landscape one week from now.

No, the thing that surprised and disappointed me most was the capitulation on Iraq funding. Here I thought it was Memorial Day weekend, but for some reason it feels like April Fools day. What happened to that strong and clear message sent by voters on November 7th? What happened to working to end the war in Iraq? Oh, I forgot, that comes in the next round of the deliberations. High sounding talk from Senator Reid and Congressman Emmanuel aside, this bill does exactly the thing Democrats were elected to stop, the issuance of blank checks to an unaccountable President for a misbegotten war.

In the run up to the vote, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings wrote an insightful post looking at the dynamics in play. Two points stand out in her criticism of the path that the Democrats appeared ready to take (and ultimately did). The first, where she asks 'what is right', assuming that the Democrats who ushered this most recent bill through do actually believe the war should be ended because it is, in the manner she describes, 'lost'.

Either you believe that the Iraq war is already lost (or perhaps: thatwhile some strategic genius might manage to save the day, George W.Bush will not), or you don't. ('Lost' here means: that we cannotsucceed in leaving behind a stable Iraq.)...If you believe this, then you have to try to end the war as soon as possible. You just do.

...How exactly those Senators and Representatives who think the war is lost should try to end it in the actual world, in which God will not do what I just described, is a tougher question. It's not obvious to me (at all) that just cutting off funding is the best way to do it -- and by 'best' I mean 'the way most likely to lead to some vote that will actually end the war'. This is a tactical question, and I have no idea which tactics are most likely to lead to such a vote. But I do not see how writing Bush a blank check could possibly be the best way to go. I honestly don't.

For some reason, I also expected cumulative measures taken by Congress to be instrumental in bringing an end to the war, sooner rather than later. But how can you accumulate anything when you keep knocking your stack of chips down to nothing? Compounded interest on nothing is still zero. Which all to say, with this bill, Bush appears in position to exercise the same unfettered primacy in execution of his splendid little war that he did during the 109th Congress.

Moving from what is right to what is politically tenable (and I will add the disclaimer that, in a perfect world, politics wouldn't enter the equation when it comes to such matters),  Hilzoy wrote:

You win, politically, by structuring things in such a way that it becomes clear why your position is right and your opponent's position is wrong. (This presupposes that your position is right, of course: making things clear does not help you if it's you who are wrong. This is why one should always try to ensure that one is right first.) In this particular case, structuring things so that both the weakness of Bush's position and his unreasonableness become clear is also essential to ending the war.

The previous bill, vetoed by Bush, was a proper step in this direction. This bill is two steps back, for two reasons. 1) It was clear Bush would veto the first bill, so it showed resolve by sending it to his desk in the manner they did, and 2) caving in completely here not only demonstrates the fleetingness of this supposed resolve, but also the inability of the strategic thinkers within the Democratic party to convincingly pursue a policy the public elected them to pursue.

I may catch grief for being negative here, but I just don't understand this approach, morally or politically. It pushes solutions to one of the most difficult problems of our time further down the road, and it lends credence to the noxious idea that Democrats don't have the stomach to stand for anything. With that in mind, I also found Kevin Drum's analysis to be plausible, though I'm not sure if I agree with it entirely. If it is accurate, it is disheartening:

...Democrats likely fear that if we forced a withdrawal we'd spend allof 2008 on the defensive as Republicans insisted that Dems were toblame for the ongoing civil war in Iraq. The public, not having beenprepared for this, might agree.

But I doubt it. The public wants out, and the death toll is so highnow that they'd likely accept that further bloodshed was bound to occurwhether we had stayed or not. Unfortunately, Dems don't have thecourage to take that chance. Apparently they'd rather fight next year'selection with an unpopular Republican war in the background rather thantake the chance of fighting it with an unpopular Democratic withdrawalin the background. As a result, we've missed yet another chance to lookdecisive on foreign policy, do the right thing in Iraq, and start theprocess of pulling ourselves out of the hole Bush has dug us into andgiving the next president a clean slate to start building a non-insanenational security policy on.

And all this gets me to wondering how the Democrats in Congress will undo this thing they have done, and when.