Sorry I don’t have better news to report on this Easter Sunday night. But Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) has shown ALL THE DEMOCRATS’ CARDS to the Bush administration and there will be no passage of the Reid-Feingold amendment, and there will be no timetables for withdrawal, and the Senate will pass a supplemental bill with nothing but empty benchmarks. Bush owns the war…
In fairness, the Democrats do not have the internal unity necessary to stare down the President and make this supplemental bill contingent on hard timetables. They don’t have the unity to fail to pass any supplemental, either.
The war will go on, and it will go on through the end of the Bush presidency. The only way that can change is if the American people can somehow infuse the Democratic caucuses in the House and the Senate with a unity of purpose that they do not presently enjoy. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try. We should try…very hard. But we shouldn’t be under any illusions. Carl Levin is the chairman of the Armed Service committee, and this is what he says:
“We’re not going to vote to cut funding, period,” Levin said. “But what we should do, and we’re going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement.”…
“We’re going to fund the troops. We always have,” Levin said. He added, “We’re very strong in supporting the troops, but we’re also strong on putting pressure on the Iraqi leaders to live up to their own commitments without that political settlement on their part, there is no military solution.”…
“We can keep the benchmarks part of the bill without saying that the troops must begin to come back within four months,” Levin said. “If that doesn’t work and the president vetoes because of that, and he will, then that part of it is removed, because we’re going to fund the troops.
If Levin says this is what is going to happen, then this is what is going to happen. This is either Levin’s sincere desire, or it is his honest appraisal of where things are going. Either way, there is no hope of winning this showdown with the President if the Armed Services chairman is taking this position.
I like Senator Levin a lot. But this is a total capitulation to the President (and totally premature). It’s an abdication of responsibility and it is the furthest thing from standing by our soldiers.
The President owns the war. The Dems will not put their newfound popularity at risk by having a showdown with the President that will make it possible to blame the Dems for the aftermath. The President owns the war and the Dems are going to make sure that the GOP owns the war all through this year and the next.
Smart politics….maybe. But morally bankrupt and completely cowardly. We’ll be paying attention when the Reid-Feingold bill (or amendment) comes up for a vote. We’ll be paying very close attention. People are going to get organized. Certain Democrats are going to pay.
what a dick.
once this plays out, and that’s the frustrating aspect of the problem. Not only are the Dems abandoning peace, they’re once again playing the whimps and hurting their 2008 chances by ever more clearly co-owning the war.
I still hope that they decide to fund in 3-4 month increments. Not that I expect it, but that at least would be something.
Think about it this way.
God help us all.
Not that we deserve it.
…I’m with you on this. There are things one just doesn’t need to say, and “We’re totally going to be the ones to blink!” is definitely on that list.
Once again, Counterpunchers have correctly divined the Dem’s intentions early on. I read at Counterpunch about two months ago that the Dems had decided that if the war continues through the election, that will get them big votes.
Of course, as a sentimental progressive, I had still been holding on to the hope that the lefties were portraying the Dems as more cynical and Machiavellian than they really are; I was hoping that when push comes to shove, they would put morality and accountability to the people above politics.
It’s different now than when Kerry ran in 2004. Then, one could still argue (though not very convincingly that the program of setting up Iraq as a US client state could still be salvaged, and Kerry obviously did want to salvage that. Now, everyone knows that Iraq is “lost”. So this is all about domestic politics, not empire management.
It’s not like it is something Bush doesn’t already know. that is what gets me about the broohaha made last week when Obama said the same thing. I kept thinking, why is everyone so hyper. It’s not like it’s something the other side has not known. Really.
The plan is to keep introducing versions of the bills and build up pressure.
Does anyone honestly think there was a chance with a one vote majority? Does anyone understand that it is going to take alot of time and positioning?
Bush does not want to leave. He will fight tooth and nail. Throw everything to keep the war from ending.
McConnels job is to make sure there isn’t the votes needed to end the war.
This is politics.
Yes, it is politics.
However, Levin kind of undermines the whole strategy by telegraphing that the ultimate plan is to fund the troops with whatever the President wants as conditions (or lack thereof).
What he is really saying is that the Dems have no intention of letting the GOP off the hook by ending the war before 2008, and then taking a share of the blame for what happens in Iraq (which will not be pretty). We’ll say, ‘We tried to warn you, we tried to get you take a different strategy, but we ultimately gave you every chance and you can’t blame us for how screwed up Iraq is.’
It’s solid politically. But it is less solid if you are this fucking obvious about it. And it totally undermines any chance we have to either win one of these votes and actually stop the war, or to display a credible threat that might alter Bush’s behavior. This is bunk.
Some people expect more than politics from politicians. Levin, like Obama, is running for office in 08. You can have your politics and the politicians who think their winning is more important than the country or the people in it.
I imagine we would be able to derail Bush if we had leaders in the Senate and not Presidential candidates. So Obama and Clinton have once again revealed where their true interests lie, and it is not with the American people.
Grrrrr!
a national party or to have a leadership role.
We’re staring down the barrel of WWIII because we have a mentally unstable President and god knows what for a Vice President.
This is not a time for careful deliberation or strategic chess games of move/counter move.
It’s time for strong leadership. It’s time for the Jim Webb’s and Jon Tester’s to kick these old fucking establishment losers out of the way in a freshman revolt and speak directly to the American people about the consequences of continued executive appeasement.
To take a hint or a lead from the House and Nancy Pelosi. Yeah I know, that’s not how it’s done, tradition, deliberation, yada, yada yada.
If the democrats don’t lead and don’t force a stop to this madness it’s time to vote None of the Above in 2008.
Signed:
An elected Democratic State Party Committee Member
Well, there’s another way the war can end.
al Sadr has more balls than our collective Congress critters. If you step back you can see his power has grown steadily while ours and that of other Iraqi players has waned. His call yesterday for Iraqi non-cooperation would not have come until it meant something.
Here at BT we wish our influence were sufficient to alter our rampaging dimwit’s course, but it is apparently not to be. The termination of the misadventurous experiment in savagery looks ripe for repeat of the helicopter retreat.
I think Webb and Levin share the same side on the war. Maybe not.
Seems he at least has a solution to work towards.
He’s coming from a soliders viewpoint which sees D.C. directed operational plans as utter messes. If faced with a Tet type offensive and a continued meatgrinder, it’ll be interesting to see what he’ll do.
With supply lines collapsing and an overland retreat to Saudi Arabia reminscent of the British retreat from Kabul in the 19th century.
Something kids will be studying two centuries from now as they read about the decline and fall of yet another empire.
Not that I’m happy with Levin for preemptively folding on funding the occupation, but I don’t think that’s where the showdown should be anyway. Booman, you’ve said yourself no country has ever suffered a catastrophic failure of a military adventure and then entrusted those who engineered the failure to oversee the subsequent withdrawal. The Dems could pass all the resolutions and benchmarks and timetables and deadlines they want. Does anyone really believe the Bush administration would comply with any of them? I don’t. The slow motion disaster in Iraq will continue essentially unchanged as long as Bush and Cheney are driving this bus. That is the real problem. I think that is where our efforts should be focused. We need to take away their keys.
We need wall to wall investigations. Everybody who is anybody in this administration needs to explain their part in this disaster. On the record and under oath. There are a truck load of smoking guns laying around. We need to find enough of them to make the case for impeachment the inevitable consensus. We need the Republicans to feel the heat for defending this administration. Never mind the Dems wanting them out, we need Republicans pushing too.
Yeah, that’s going to take time. Does anyone think rehashing vetoed funding bills will be any faster? I don’t.
Why are people shocked that Dems aren’t going to cut off funds for the war? Did they promise that in the 2006 elections? No. They were careful not to get branded that way.
Don’t be mad at Carl Levin, be mad at the people that can actually turn the tide, and that is GOP moderates on the Hill. More of them need to vote with their conscience and not just back Bush.
Look, Bush isn’t leaving Iraq on his own will. Everyone understand that. Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Lieberman would never leave. But there are plenty of GOPers on the Hill that have had enough. They are just scared to defy Bush. Once they go with their conscience (or fear of 2008 election), we will be able to pass a veto proof bill.
And I don’t see why bloggers want their dem leaders to be coy about whether or not they are going to fund the troops. To mess with Bush’s mind? What does that gain? You want the MSM to have the chance for weeks to talk about how the Dems may not fund the troops? Bring back a bunch of stories about Vietnam and relive the way dems have been framed for 30 years? You really want it ‘up in the air’ that your party may not fund the troops? Remember, this is gonna be played out in the MSM, not in blogger land.
Levin is doing a smart move. Keep the pressure on the GOPers on the Hill who know we need to start withdrawing and know that they are heading for more bloodshed in 2008 if they back Bush over the will of the American people.
The Dems own this war as much as they president does. They voted for it at the outset, and they have backed down from even symbolic efforts to end it.
What we are witnessing, I am afraid, is the complete and total failure of the American political system. The Founders designed a good system, but no system is strong enough to withstand total corruption on the other hand, and cowardly mendacity on the other.
The resurrection will not be televised.
Now I’m a dirty radical peacenik loonycrat.