The House Gives Thumbs-Up To Obama's War

The White House muscled through a bill yesterday in the House of Representatives that provides $106 billion dollars in supplemental funding, much of it for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a controversial measure adding $5 billion to a line of credit for the IMF, some pandemic flu funding, a bunch of planes that the Air Force never even requested, and a Christmas tree of other proposals. The final margin was 226-202, with 32 Democrats sticking to their positions and voting no (5 Republicans voted yes). Fortunately the photo-suppression amendment was stripped out of the bill, a small but important victory (although I can't seem to gather whether or not it was stuffed into the bill regulating tobacco). There's also a major initiative in the bill called "cash for clunkers," which I want to address in a separate post.

Jane Hamsher did some amazing work getting the White House to sweat over this, and she ought to be commended for it. Rahm Emanuel really backed himself into a corner by putting the IMF funding inside the war spending bill. Democrats in tough districts got forked - support the bill and you voted for bailing out European banks, oppose it and you voted to abandon troops on the battlefield. I suppose the same could be said for Republicans, but Democrats pulling the "he voted against the troops" trick never seems to work. As for stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, clearly we have about 30 votes for that in the House, which is kind of pitiful. Jane was able to do the work she did by leveraging Republican opposition.

Just remember:

They had to hold it open 10 extra minutes and after the Dems hit 218 and there were five GOP votes that scurried in under the wire.

We made the President of the United States himself whip to get the votes.

We tried to make the Dems fight like this when Bush was in office to stop funding the war, but they wouldn't--so we did it ourselves.

I'm very proud to have worked with every single one of you. This was going to be a rout. They had to work for it.

Let's do it again.

I wish the timeline language was in the Iraq part of the funding, since the Administration has repeatedly vowed to honor the status of forces agreement. And an endgame strategy in the incomparably difficult maze in Afghanistan would also be nice. But it's now Obama's war, and should it go awry, he'll receive a deserved amount of blame.

A nice reform for Congress, though one that would never happen, would be to end the practice of adding unrelated riders to must-pass spending bills.

Making Joe Lieberman Cry

Jane Hamsher reports that the Lieberman-Graham detainee photo suppression amendment has been dropped from the war funding supplemental, owing to pressure from liberal Democrats, who refused to vote for a bill that would undermine the Freedom of Information Act and increase executive power. They only got into that position because conservatives in the House refused to vote for a war supplemental that included increased funding for the IMF. But progressives took full advantage of the opportunity and struck the first blow against agglomerated executive power that I can remember in a long, long time.

The underlying bill doesn't much send a thrill up my leg either. But progressive Democrats saw a leverage point, picked it, and attacked until the forces supporting increased executive power had to give up. And that's a good thing. Hopefully they'll keep using this muscle.

...Here's how Huckleberry and Holy Joe will respond to this loss - with the equivalent of a temper tantrum:

"We strongly believe that the first responsibilities of government are the nation's security and the protection of those brave Americans who go into harm's way to defend it.

"The President has said that the release of the photos of detainees in US custody would 'put our troops and civilians serving our nation abroad in greater danger.' We agree with the Commander in Chief.

"We will employ all the legislative means available to us including opposing the supplemental war spending bill and attaching this amendment, which was unanimously adopted by the Senate, to every piece of legislation the Senate considers, to be sure the President has the authority he needs not to release these photos and any others that would jeopardize the safety and security of our troops.

"The release of the photos will serve as propaganda and recruiting tool for terrorists who seek to attack American citizens at home and abroad. We should strive to have as open a government as possible, but the behavior depicted in the photos has been prohibited and is being investigated. The photos do not depict anything that is not already known. Transparency, and in this case needless transparency, should not be paid for with the lives of American citizens, let alone the lives of our men and women in uniform fighting on our behalf in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Let it clearly be understood that without this legislation the photos in question are likely to be released. Such a release would be tantamount to a death sentence to some who are serving our nation in the most dangerous and difficult spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is this certain knowledge of these consequences of having the photos released that will cause us to vote against the supplemental and continue our push to turn our important amendment into law."

I didn't know you could actually hear crying in press release form.

I wouldn't slam Graham and Lieberman by the way. It certainly seems to me that they're running interference for the President. Direct the inquiries to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

More Billions For Afghanistan

In other news taking the stars out of my eyes, the House overwhelmingly approved a $97 billion dollar supplemental appropriation, mainly for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with little debate and much less fanfare. 51 Democrats and 9 Republicans defied the Bush Obama Administration on this, while others approved it but did argue that they had little patience for the policy and wouldn't agree to an open-ended commitment.

Chief among them is Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., author of the House legislation as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. But for now he's giving Obama a chance to demonstrate greater progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"This is a bill that I have very little confidence in," Obey said. "I think we have a responsibility to give a new president — who did not get us into this mess — the best possible opportunity to get out of it."

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., is opposing the infusion of war funds. He's not impressed with Obama's plans on Afghanistan.

"Sometimes great presidents make mistakes, and sometimes great presidents make even great mistakes. I hope that doesn't happen here," McGovern said. "As the mission has grown bigger, the policy has grown even more vague."

We really haven't heard a clearly articulated policy in Afghanistan. The ostensible goal is to root out Al Qaeda camps, but the President's own top generals admit that they are no longer in Afghanistan. Furthermore, safe havens for terrorists could realistically be in a mosque in Newark or London or Brazil as easily as anywhere else.

Obama wants to avoid a failed state in Afghanistan. Yet his tactics of relentless bombing, exactly what he vowed to AVOID by adding new troops, only leads in the direction toward a loss of confidence in the central government, and an opportunity for the Taliban. We supposedly have a new general and a new strategy based on counter-insurgency and winning hearts and minds, yet airstrikes do the exact opposite, inflaming and angering local populations. And furthermore, this new general seems to have a nasty habit of lying to people to protect his own skin.

I just don't see the strategy beyond just Bush-plus in Afghanistan. The White House is giving it attention, and trying to implement a more regional strategy, but it makes sense to question the premises here.

We're Going Off Budget Again?

I thought that the Obama Administration was boldly putting the full cost of war back on budget so we can understand the costs and wouldn't play political games with votes. Someone wanna help me with this?

President Barack Obama is seeking $83.4 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for a war supplemental spending bill like the ones he sometimes opposed when he was senator and George W. Bush was president.

Obama's request, including money to increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan, would push the costs of the two wars to almost $1 trillion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to the Congressional Research Service. The additional money would cover operations into the fall.

I fail to understand the reason why this is being sought off budget. It violates campaign promises and the initial budget proposal. I guess the foreign aid, including aid to Pakistan for economic development, is included in the bill, and perhaps that was imperiled without being combined with war funding. But it's all very curious. And depressing.

See also Stephen Walt on this, wondering whether the threat of safe havens - or even terrorism itself - even justifies escalating a war in South Asia. A welcome antidote to the pieces I've seen on the "progressive" side of the ledger. Excerpting:

In short, my concern is that we are allowing an exaggerated fear of al Qaeda to distort our foreign policy priorities. Having underestimated the danger from al Qaeda before 9/11, have we now swung too far the other way? I am not arguing for a Pollyanna-like complacency or suggesting that we simply ignore the threat that groups like al Qaeda still pose. Rather, I'm arguing that the threat is not as great as the administration -- and most Americans, truth be told -- seem to think, and that the actual danger does not warrant escalating U.S. involvement in Central Asia.

Why Does Bush Hate The Troops?

Last year Jim Webb and others offered the dwell time amendment to the defense appropriations bill and the emergency supplemental, calling for the Defense Department to allow a soldier as much time at home as he has in the field. The Administration called it craven, Republicans termed it a "slow-bleed" strategy and everybody questioned everybody's patriotism.

Bush just agreed to it today.

President Bush plans to announce today that he will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year's troop buildup in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military, administration officials said.

The move is in response to intense pressure from service commanders who have expressed anxiety about the toll of long deployments on their soldiers and, more broadly, about the U.S. military's ability to confront unanticipated threats. Bush will announce the decision during a national speech, in which aides said he will also embrace Army Gen. David H. Petraeus's plan to indefinitely suspend a drawdown of forces.

They can suspend the drawdown, or pause, as per the current parlance, but without the 15-month tours they cannot draw back up if needed. And so the President is basically acknowledging the endgame in Iraq. And don't let him tell you that troop decisions will be made based on conditions on the ground. He just consigned the US to a smaller force in Iraq regardless of the conditions.

Now, John McCain's refusal to rule out pre-emptive war means that he would have to increase tours of duty back to 15 months and/or dramatically increase the size of the Army, and the only way to do that is through a draft. The logical outcome of McCain's foreign policy is the end of the all-volunteer Army. So, let the buyer beware.

With respect to Iraq, this really does spell the end and I think Bush must have been given the message that it's basically over. When you see someone like Kenneth Pollack basically admit that a responsible withdrawal is demanded, you know that there's actually this sea change that very few people are noticing out in the field. The frustration on the faces of Congressmembers during the Petraeus/Crocker hearings showed that they've basically had it. Every step forward is accompanied by two steps back, and in the process we are losing lives and diverting resources from the real national security challenges. You're going to see this manifest itself first in the pullback of money from the war. Here's some more of the Post article.

Democrats moved to press Bush on another front, linking the sagging U.S. economy to escalating war costs. On a day when oil hit $112 a barrel for the first time, lawmakers said that energy-rich Iraq should be footing more of its own bills. "We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). "They have got to have some skin in the game."

Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) met yesterday to craft a bipartisan bill to make Iraq take on a greater share of the financial burden. Under their plan, any future U.S. money for reconstruction would take the form of a loan to be repaid, and Baghdad would have to pay for fuel used by U.S. troops and for the training of its own security forces, and make payments to the predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement taking on al-Qaeda.

"It's time, in fact long past time, the Iraqis start bearing a larger portion of the costs for this war," Collins said. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) echoed the sentiment. "Doesn't it just make sense that record-high gas prices pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, rather than the American taxpayer?" he asked.

This issue is resonant and I think it will click with voters. So money will come out, the troops will remain for another year because nobody in the Congress has the balls to fully fund withdrawal and nothing else. However, dwell time will return to balance (albeit with a waiting period just long enough to keep up the pace of deployments until Bush leaves office), the money burden will shift more and more to the Iraqis, and there will absolutely be an accountability moment on the war in November, with responsible withdrawal on the table. And the people are on the side of getting out. If Republicans want to bet on the electorate's resolve to stay inside Iraq with no endgame strategy and no plan for even defining success, go ahead. We're see you at the Inaugural ball - before we go inside.

Same As It Ever Was

Another Iraq vote with a phased withdrawal "goal" blocked by the Senate. Someone has to explain to me why Dodd voted no, however. Is he going the Kucinich "no more money for Iraq" route?

Before this, a vote to pay for the war with no strings attached failed by the same vote.

Doesn't seem like Reid forced a real filibuster yet.

UPDATE: From Dodd:

"My position has been clear for months - the only way to end the war is with a firm deadline that is enforceable through funding. While I commend my colleagues in taking a step in that direction, this president's actions and continued rhetoric give me little conifidence that setting a "goal" date for redeployment will force his hand."

"I will continue to fight for a firm and enforceable deadline tied to funding to end the war and restore American security."

In the Senate that's a positively revolutionary position.

UPDATE: Roll call of the full funding with no strings attached bill. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe voted for a timeline AND voted for funding with no strings attached. The Mainers are trying to have it both ways. On the other hand, George Voinovich voted against funding with no strings attached, AND funding with a timeline, like Dodd.

The Democratic Leader Who Cried Wolf

Unfortunately, I've seen this too many times this year to believe it absent real action.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that Democrats won't approve more money for the Iraq war this year unless President Bush agrees to begin bringing troops home.

By the end of the week, the House and Senate planned to vote on a $50 billion measure for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would require Bush to initiate troop withdrawals immediately with the goal of ending combat by December 2008.

If Bush vetoes the bill, "then the president won't get his $50 billion," Reid, D-Nev., told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made a similar statement last week in a closed-door caucus meeting.

It's clear that this is the way you SHOULD negotiate, but not at all clear that this is how they WILL, especially after another barrage of "Democrats hate our troops" rhetoric. The real loss here was a few months back, when they didn't effectively combat the hardening narrative that "we're winning!!1!" in Iraq, so any definitive action now will be met by copious amounts of "Democrats are stabbing the soldiers in the back" rhetoric to add onto the hate the troops rhetoric.

I am happy with this line, however:

"We will and we must pay for whatever cost to protect the American people," said House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. "But tragically, unfortunately, incredibly, the war is not making us safer."

If they're going to believe the "we must support the troops by sending them off to die" hype, at least they can turn it on its head by rightly alleging that the war isn't making us safer.

Ever On The March Of War - We Ain't Leavin'

Bush needs $42 billion more to ensure that every country on Earth hates us and more of our men and women die:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration on Monday asked for an additional $42.3 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the 2008 request for total war funding to $189.3 billion.

The request comes on top of $147 billion already sought for in the wars. Most of the money goes to Iraq, which is costing the Pentagon an estimated $2 billion a week.

"Parts of this war are complicated, but one part is not -- and that is that America should do what it takes to support our troops and protect our people," President Bush said in an appearance with members of veterans groups at the White House.

Actually, that's quite complicated, because growing numbers of Americans, 70% and counting, don't believe that this occupation protects any people, least of all Americans, and that supporting the troops by holding them hostage in the middle of a civil war doesn't make any sense, either.

Unfortunately, we still have too much of a Democratic caucus that's still afraid of their own shadow. Harry Reid is claiming that this won't be a "rubber stamp," but we've been down this road before. The President is already framing it the same way he always has, equating funding the war with funding the troops, and Democrats have not even attempted to challenge that frame. Not to mention the fact that it's singularly difficult to un-fund a war from a political standpoint; it took 7 years to do it in Vietnam.

But the part that really galls me is that the key portion of St. Petraeus' testimony, the only takeaway, is about to be reneged.

In multiple public interviews after his testimony, Petraeus vowed to bring the 30,000 troops home by next summer. “[W]hat I showed on Capitol Hill…will take place,” he said on PBS. “Starting in mid-December and then ending in mid-July, the five Army brigade combat teams and two Marine battalions will redeploy,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

President Bush warmly embraced Petraeus’s plan. But it now appears Petraeus may backtrack from this central tenet of his congressional testimony. After undergoing a revision of the “classified campaign strategy” on Iraq, a senior Petraeus adviser reports that Petraeus is willing to leave the troops in Iraq depending on “the security situation on the ground”:

“Redeployments of U.S. brigades — even of the surge forces — are dependent on the security situation on the ground in Iraq. If General Petraeus early next year sees the security situation deteriorating, he will have the courage to go back to the president and say he needs to keep forces that he had planned to send home,” said Col. John R. Martin, senior adviser to Petraeus.

In other words, things are worse than you can imagine, and we have to leave endless amounts of troops in a desperate and unwinnable situation in perpetuity. So the talk of ending the surge was a rhetorical strategy designed for headlines, while this quiet reversal goes little-noticed. St. Petraeus is still a saint and must not be questioned, even though his entire testimony must now be called into question. If the security circumstances on the ground suddenly justify keeping 160,000 troops in Iraq, aren't ALL the premises of Petraeus' hearing flawed?

By the way, now the big worry is the Shiite militias. Really, I thought it was Al Qaeda in Iraq? Or the Sunni militias? Or the PKK/Turkey cross-border situation? Or the OTHER Shiite militias (are you talking about the Badr Brigade on the Mahdi Army?) or...

Never mind. The latest "threat" is a moving target, always has been. The truth is that there are several competing factions vying for power in Iraq, all of them scornful of American efforts to occupy the country. So our failure to leave fuels all sorts of violence.

My worry is that the Democrats will fund this thing but get a concession by, say, folding SCHIP into the funding request, which would be stupid. Because politically, there's much more to be gained out of bending the opposition to your will on SCHIP than folding it into an Iraq funding that many Democrats would see as another betrayal. Not to mention, the headlines on SCHIP would be dwarfed by those about the Iraq bill, so it would be a hidden victory, just like the minimum wage was.

Please Go Home, Joe Biden

I don't even know why I'm wasting my time on Joe Biden, a guy who has about as much of a chance getting the Democratic nomination for President as Joe Lieberman does (for that matter, as much of a chance as I do). But this is pretty low. Most of the top Presidential candidates are skipping a debate put on by the CBC that is being shown on Fox News. There are legitimate reasons for this, because Fox News is simply not a credible news outlet, and the last time they held a Democratic debate it was a complete debacle. But Biden played the race card in trying to focus the attention on the CBC instead of Fox News.

"The single most important constituency in the Democratic Party -- African Americans, led by the Black Caucus, which are the leadership of the black community, asked us to show for a debate and we're not going to show up?" he said.

"Let me put it this way -- if the African American community stayed home or voted Republican, we're not going to elect another president."

That's not the point and Biden knows it. But he wants to make some cheap points with black voters. This is particularly amusing coming from the guy who approvingly called Barack Obama "clean" (by the way, Obama's skipping the debate, does that mean HE doesn't care about black people?) and burnished his credentials in South Carolina by proudly stating that he's a southerner because Delaware was a slave state (maybe that can be their new state motto; Delaware - Remember, We Were A Slave State!).

But that wasn't the only thing Biden was chatty about. He decided to criticize Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for voting against the Iraq spending bill, buying into the right wing frame that it would "hurt the troops" by cutting off funding for them in the field, which is patently untrue. But that wasn't the most outrageous statement. He defended his own vote to fund the occupation on CNN by saying this:

BIDEN: This gets down to how do you change this war, Wolf?

Do you think the president of the United States, over the next four months -- this is only a four-month funding bill, for four months -- do you think, by us cutting off funding, he's going to withdraw troops?

And what do you think is going to happen to those troops in the field, as they run out of money?

Do you think this guy's going to pull them out? I'm not about to do that.

He's literally saying that the President would defy Congress and hold American troops hostage in a war zone, so there's no choice but to give in to his demands. That's the weakest, most infuriating statement I've seen on Iraq yet. Funding the war because the President won't listen anyway? Why hold Congress in session, in that case?

Joe Biden can go on that debate on Fox News, and then stay there as an analyst. Don't go back to Washington if you don't think your job is worth doing.

"Jane Harman Hasn't Changed"

That's what her campaign manager told me just a month ago, after I gave him numerous chances to concede that she's a more progressive Congresswoman now than she was before she was subject to a primary from Marcy Winograd. But after today's events, where she not only voted against the supplemental bill, but was one of only seven Democrats, along with McNerney and Stark, to vote against accepting the rules for debate, a vote which came tantalizingly close to failing (216-201).

This is clearly a long way from the person who called herself "the best Republican in the Democratic Party." But it's been a year-long evolution for Harman. It's not only Iraq; she's introduced legislation to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, has called to put the Iraq war on budget, and done several other good works of which progressives can be proud.

This was also personal. Harman's constituent, Pfc. Joseph Anzack, was found floating in the Euphrates River yesterday, one of the three soldiers taken prisoner by insurgents that sadly turned up dead. Her statement on that tragedy is here.

Today is a shitty day. The war is now essentially funded until the end of Bush's tenure (the supplemental covers to September, but the defense appropriation for FY2008 then kicks in to carry well into next year). The Democratic leadership gave Bush the ability to use critical funding money as leverage to force the Iraqis to pass an oil law that privatizes the entire industry for the benefit of multinationals (that benchmark, I can assure you, won't be waived). The leadership played a good hand in the worst way possible, dissipating the goodwill of the American people and showing through their actions the lack of any capacity to lead. We can only take solace in the efforts of the rank and file to deliver a strong "no" message. And Jane Harman, given the fact that she most certainly has changed in myriad ways, is the best embodiment of that we have in Congress. (By the way, PRIMARIES MATTER!!!)

HARMAN VOTES “NO” ON IRAQ SUPPLEMENTAL

Calls vote a referendum on this President’s failure to listen; says claims that troops will be under-funded are “rubbish”

Today, Representative Jane Harman (D-Venice) issued the following statement after her vote against the Iraq Supplemental Appropriations bill:

“Last weekend, I made my fourth visit to Iraq. Each time, despite the extraordinary dedication and effort of US and Iraqi soldiers, the country has seemed less secure. I stayed overnight inside Baghdad’s Green Zone in one of the trailer pods used by most Americans there. A day later I learned that a nearby pod had been totally destroyed by an RPG launched into the Zone in broad daylight.

“In Ramadi in Anbar Province commanders on the ground described real security improvements, but our group still needed full body armor to walk down the main shopping street, and I remain unpersuaded that our combat mission can succeed. The time has come for it to end. We must redeploy out of Iraq.

“Today’s vote offers two unsatisfactory choices.

“A ‘yes’ vote affirms funding for the troops and benchmarks, but fails to impose a responsible end to the combat mission.

“A ‘no’ vote will be manipulated to tell the troops I flew with on a C-130 just days ago that we are not sending the new anti-IED vehicles (MRAPs) and other support they so desperately need. Rubbish. Today’s vote is not about that. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will make certain that essential equipment arrives.

“Today’s vote must be seen as a referendum on this President’s refusal to listen to a majority of Americans and a majority of Congress, who want him to end the combat mission and implement the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations on training, counter-insurgency, and enhanced diplomatic and economic efforts in the region.

“I support our troops and I refuse to be manipulated. My ‘no’ vote on the Iraq Supplemental is a vote to move past the fractured politics on Iraq and restore some sanity and bipartisanship as Congress confronts the serious threats of the 21st century.”

UPDATE: Joe Klein really is the stupidest man alive.

86 Dems

The vast majority of Democrats in the House voted against the supplemental. It passed anyway, with near-unanimous support from Republicans. The final count was 280-142. 86 Democrats voted for the bill, and voted to co-own the war. Their names are here, and it's everyone you'd expect (though Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a particularly surprising addition. Same with Joe Sestak and Tim Walz).

That you could pass a bill in Congress when only a little over 1/3 of the majority supports it shows you just how much of a cave this really was.

I think I've said everything that needs to be said. I appreciate those who voted against this blank check, and those who voted for it just bought themselves a war. The Senate should vote on this tonight.

UPDATE: Is there nothing that John Boehner won't cry about? Mr. Tough Guy Daddy Party Majority leader set the water works flowing during the floor debate. He did the same thing in February. I thought the GOP was supposed to be tough. This guy wets the bed, literally, with any talk of Al Qaeda (who, by the way, isn't the major actor in Iraq, so stop lying).

Don't tell me the Republicans wouldn't run ads of a leading Democrat crying on the House floor and call him a wuss and a Nancy boy. Of course, the Dems can't do that because it was their own goddamn bill.

UPDATE II: 80-14 in the Senate. Obama and Clinton both vote NO, along with Dodd, Kerry, Sanders, Leahy, Feingold, and others. Biden, yes. Durbin, yes. Reid, yes. Klobuchar, yes. It was a bloodbath.

Congratulations, Democrats, you own the war. And now that there's no difference on that issue between you and the Republicans, prepare to lose seats in 2008.

Feingold

Why is he the only politician who can figure this out?

You know what’s going to happen in September? They’ll bring General Petraeus back and he’ll say, Just give me until the end of year. I think things are turning around. And then we’ll be out of session, come back in late January, February, and the fact is a thousand more troops will lose their lives in a situation that doesn’t make any sense and it is hurting our military, hurting our country. This should not wait till September.

OK, he's not the only one, there's Dodd, Kerry, Sanders and Leahy, along with John Edwards from outside the Senate. I just called Boxer and she's given no indication of how she'll vote. But isn't Feingold's point obvious? Name the last active-duty general carrying out a mission that would dare say "I don't think we can do it, guys, we should go home." It doesn't happen. Furthermore, generals SHOULDN'T dictate foreign policy. This isn't a military junta. It's supposed to be a democracy, barely.

Nobody likes this war and the Democratic leadership in Congress is about to fund it. Why?

UPDATE: It's tangential, but this from Rick Perlstein deserves wide attention.

President Bush today: "These people attacked us before we were even in Iraq!"

Can we have a little frankness, please?

The President of the United States is a racist. Or at the very least, an anti-Muslim bigot.

In Iraq, Shi'ites and Sunni are fighting each other to the death. Under what possible logic can they be joined by a common identity?

There is no "these people" except in their common Middle East-ness.

Iran and Iraq fought a decade-long war - Shia against Sunni. They are, to our president, "these people." "They" attacked us. "They" continue to attack us. Iran, Iraq: all the same.

And the Democratic leadership is endorsing these blurred lines by voting to fund a misbegotten war.

UPDATE II: The reason people hate this war, and especially the surge, is because it's not working.

More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.

UPDATE III:

Fish Gonna Swim, Republicans Gonna Be Mean

So why the fuck would you care if they're going to be mean for any particular reason?

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Are you kidding me? The President spent the entire election season last year essentially saying that Democrats would be responsible for getting American babies blown up if elected, and we WON THE ELECTION RESOUNDINGLY!

I'll tell you, the excuses being made for this inexcusable el foldo move are worse than the move itself. Saying we actually won? Puh-leeze. We're not idiots. The winners and losers are clear.

We need WHOLESALE changes in the Democratic leadership, particularly the consultant class that literally have no idea what they're doing. I predict the rank-and-file will by and large do us proud today. It's the leadership that deserves the blame.

Vote No

Despite the fact that there's no rewriting what happened yesterday on Iraq, the best thing that can happen now is to get an overwhelming majority of rank and file Democratic votes against this blank check. And this is not purely a lefty blogger rabble position: the mainstream DC Democratic Think Progress, run by Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, is calling on Congress to reject the toothless supplemental.

MoveOn is whipping the vote. At least individual Congressmen can save face and stand firm against the sell-out from the leadership.

The president has played political brinksmanship over the war in Iraq time and time again. He refuses to acknowledge the futility of his approach, disregards the clear message sent by the American people last fall, and falsely claims that the only way for Congress to support the troops is to prolong the war. That's just not true. Congress can support the troops and end the war, which is exactly what the bill they sent the president last month would have done. When the president vetoed that bill, it was the president alone who was blocking support for the troops. Nobody else.

Any compromise that funds the war through the end of the fiscal year isn't a compromise at all, it's a capitulation. As I have said repeatedly, Congress should send the president the same bill he vetoed again and again until he realizes he has no choice but to start bringing our troops home.

To say that "Congress had to fund the troops before Memorial Day" is a media creation. Out in the country people don't want to see stories like this anymore. If the Democrats were going to listen to the pundits instead of the people they should have given the money to begin with. There is no short-term redemption for them; but individuals can show where they stand by voting no on the supplemental.

UPDATE: Biden put it succinctly on Hardball: you can either vote with the President or vote with the troops. Of course, he'll probably go ahead and vote for this bill.

Believing the Hype

Yes, Glenn Greenwald gets this exactly right.

What does seem clear is that one of the principal factors accounting for the reluctance of Democrats to advocate de-funding is that the standard corruption that infects our political discourse has rendered the de-funding option truly radioactive. Republicans and the media have propagated -- and Democrats have frequently affirmed -- the proposition that to de-fund a war is to endanger the "troops in the field."

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").

This is exactly correct. And if the Democrats weren't going to fight back on this frame (indeed, Pelosi reinforced it day after day right from the beginning), then they shouldn't have even tried to stop the occupation in the manner that they did in the first place. They unnecessarily constrained themselves by playing into the entire idea. Feingold held an entire hearing on the concept of de-funding and what it actually means historically. Nobody paid any attention. So we had Pelosi and Reid rushing headlong into a futile plan because they weren't willing to do what Congress is sanctioned by the Constitution to do to end the occupation.

The lack of proper civics instruction, incidentally, is BY DESIGN. There's nothing on the NCLB tests schools must now teach to about this kind of stuff.

Hey Democrats, Take A Look At What You've Bought!

I know the bloom of buying an entire war has barely come off the rose. I mean, Democrats haven't had a whole war of their own to play with since 1969! But with Iraq, you get so much more than just a war. Just take a look:

You also receive the world's largest embassy, a 592 million-dollar, 104 acre pleasure palace brought in on time and on budget, maybe the only thing in Iraq built with solid construction and free of bomb distress! This 21-building "Thunderdome on the Tigris" should in no way give the impression that Americans are imperial occupiers fixing to stay in Iraq until time immemorial! After all, the Democrats bought Iraq, and they have no such imperial designs!

But that's not all. At no extra charge, other than the $120 billion appropriated, you will get a fine collection of lily pads! And when I say lily pads, I mean permanent installations for 30-40,000 soldiers:

[W]hat it essentially envisions is a series of military installations around Iraq, maybe five or six of them, a total of maybe 30-40 thousand U.S. troops in Iraq for a long period of time, lasting, maybe a few decades. And the idea is that these bases will be somewhat hermetically sealed, that U.S. military forces won’t be leaving them, they won’t be conducting presence patrols and the patrols they conduct now. Ground convoys won’t be driving into them.

Airplanes will be essentially landing in to deliver supplies and these sort of lily pads will be in various strategic areas in Iraq … And that will enable the U.S. military to maintain a presence in the country, perhaps…for a few decades.

This is exactly the kind of infrastructure you'll need to keep a perpetual residual force in Iraq, just like your leading Presidential candidate wants to do!

But wait! Because you acted now, we're going to throw in absolutely free a confidential second surge! Some call it escalation; hell, you just bought it, call it whatever you want! But the point is that you'll be presiding over a situation in Iraq with not 100,000, not 150,000, but 200,000 troops in country by Christmas!

The little-noticed efforts to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq are being carried out without the fanfare that accompanied President Bush’s initial troop surge in January.

The second “surge” of troops to Iraq is being executed by deploying more combat brigades to the country, plus extending tours of duty for troops already there.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, the U.S. commander who led NATO troops into Bosnia in late 1995, asked to comment on the findings, said: “It doesn’t surprise me that they’re not talking about it. I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this.”

Shhh!!!

Now, when you buy the war in Iraq, you don't just get the occupation or the death statistics or the soldiers held hostage to increased deployments. No, you also get the Iraqi government, a plucky bunch of 275 of the most well-rested lawmakers this side of the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, if you want to meet with them, you don't even need to leave the country!

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani at the Mayo clinic for medical treatment. SCIRI/SICI leader Abdul Aziz Hakim in Houston for treatment of lung cancer. The two leading candidates for greater federalism of Iraq in the States for medical treatment.

Some might find it odd that the President of Iraq would leave at a crucial time for the Parliament to satisfy benchmarks to lose weight at a fat farm, but on the other hand, it may be perfect timing for the latest potential gift to you, Democrats: a freshly minted and new Iraqi government!

As Iraq's government compiles a record of failure, the Bush administration is under growing pressure to intervene to rearrange Baghdad's dysfunctional political order, or even install a new leadership.

Publicly, administration officials say they remain committed to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, even though after a year in office, his elected government has failed to complete any important steps toward political reconciliation — the legislative "benchmarks" sought by U.S. officials.

But privately, some U.S. officials acknowledge that the congressional clamor to find another approach will increase sharply in coming months if no progress is made toward tamping down sectarian violence, bringing more minority Sunnis into the government and fairly dividing up the nation's oil resources.

Yes, those oil resources must be divided fairly... between the heads of the world's biggest oil companies, that is. And if they aren't, this would certainly be a good time to put in a strongman like Iyad Allawi to oversee the country. After all, Democrats, you just bought the war, why not clean house and change the leadership in one fell swoop! I mean, this government certainly isn't responding to threats.

Note this: Bush and Cheney have resorted to threatening the al-Maliki government with a withdrawal of American forces if they don't pass the Oil Law. And the effect on the Iraqis is . . . "OK, go ahead and leave. We'll start planning for that contingency now." This means that Cheney and Bush just shot their wad, and lost.

Leave? No, no, there's no leaving. We Democrats just got this thing!

I don't want to leave out some of the exciting consolation prizes Democrats will receive. They get a stalled domestic agenda, a release of the ability to end the war to the Republicans who wrote the benchmark bill and set the "September timeline" in the first place, a fresh stream of newly declassified information designed to dishonestly keep America in Iraq longer by claiming it will be a terrorist haven if we leave, and... a base to launch a whole new war with Iran!!! Sorry, a "covert action." So covert that you can see it off the coast.

The U.S. Navy staged its latest show of military force off the Iranian coastline on Wednesday, sending two aircraft carriers and landing ships packed with 17,000 U.S. Marines and sailors to carry out unannounced exercises in the Persian Gulf.

The carrier strike groups led by the USS John C. Stennis and USS Nimitz were joined by the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard and its own strike group, which includes landing ships carrying members of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

The Navy said nine U.S. warships passed through the narrow Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. Merchant ships passing through the busy strait carry two-fifths of the world's oil exports.

So enjoy your new gifts, Democrats. You'll have enough to keep you busy for the next 18 months! Sure, it might cost you a contribution or three...

The Terrible Politics of the Iraq Funding Debacle

More than anything, what upsets me about this out and out cave-in from the Democratic leadership on the Iraq bill is how poor they played it politically. If the leadership quickly realized that they didn't have the votes for withdrawal or to sustain a veto for any kind of timeline, and they reasoned that they couldn't be seen as denying the troops money - and they had their minds made up about both of these very early, by February - why not give in early and press the domestic agenda instead of getting everyone's hopes up, only to set a self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day and then cave, in the process derailing the other legislation that was critical to electoral success in 2006? Not only are the headlines tomorrow going to be awful, but they lost MORE, far more than they gained in fighting the President to this point. Consider this, via Steve Soto, who I think is one of the sharpest minds in the business when it comes to things like this:

Both Harry Reid and Steny Hoyer stated the obvious today: that the Democrats don't have a veto-proof majority in either house. Yeah, so? You knew this back in February, as did most everyone else. It was your job and everyone else in the Democratic leadership to fashion a strategy that made the GOP pay a price for rubber-stamping Bush's surge while still pushing your agenda. And you and your Beltway consultants failed. So stop your whining and get back to the drawing board [...]

Instead of shifting the burden onto the GOP leadership for finding the votes for a “no-strings” funding bill back in February, and moving ahead with the Democrats’ domestic agenda, Reid and Pelosi got sucked into a futile battle to change course without the numbers or messaging to force such a change. Now, they both will face a hostile Democratic base over the summer while the GOP leadership quietly works towards a face-saving break with Bush late this year. And all the Democrats have to show for it are declining poll numbers, just like Bush.

The worst part of this was imposing this Memorial Day deadline for no good reason. Bush played it the way he goes on about how the terrorists would play a timeline - he waited the Dems out and they panicked. They should have said "our work is done, sign our bill or round up a majority for your own bill" and forced the minority to whip up the votes to rubber-stamp Bush's war. Instead we did the work for them.

AND, if a deal is reached, it'll be the GOP in Congress who "stopped the war." After all, THEIR benchmarks are what made the final bill. THEIR timeline of September is the working assumption in Washington of when the dynamic will change. How could a self-respecting Democratic Party, politically speaking, give away the ability to end an unpopular war and break with an unpopular President?

The domestic agenda has been lying fallow for months while the leadership played a game of chicken that they knew they weren't about to push to win. And adding the minimum wage bill and those Katrina/farm relief programs to this package was doubly stupid. Most true antiwar progressives, like Feingold, aren't going to support a toothless Iraq bill. So now you've put them all in the outrageous position of having to vote against the minimum wage increase, a cruel little trick designed to keep those who don't want to see "Congressman X voted against the minimum wage" ads in their districts next November. And any benefit from FINALLY enacting one piece of the "100 Hour" agenda will be largely forgotten in the wake of the stories about how the Dems conceded and Bush won.

Here's Soto again:

So, four months of bruises leaves the Democrats with perhaps only a minimum wage increase to show for it. In the hopper and still to come is a trade bill written by K Street, a weakened ethics bill, a cave-in on Medicare Part D reform, and nothing yet on an expansion of the SCHIP or implementing fully the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Yes, they are investigating everything that they should, but they still haven’t started the court challenge over White House rejection of congressional subpoenas.

There was a window of time back in early February when the Democratic leadership had split the GOP caucus with the domestic agenda, and that moment has been lost, a casualty of the war funding debates and the Democratic leadership’s willingness to resume its love affair with corporate cash.

It's enough to make you sick. This Congress was elected solely to challenge Bush on Iraq. The other popular pieces of the domestic agenda were nice side benefits. Now the Congress has delivered neither, and their way forward looks completely muddled. (somebody want to tell me why we're debating a crappy IMMIGRATION bill that nobody likes in the Senate right now, when there's so much of the 100 Hour agenda still unpassed?)

Chris Bowers isn't wrong that we've come a long way in the progressive movement (7 years ago our VP candidate was Joe Lieberman) and that we still need to grow our majority of the majority. But all of that was well-known a while ago. It's the horrible politics of this action that irks me. There was a time when I thought Harry Reid was a decent gambler as a leader. He just folded a straight flush while Bush had aces high. He's failed, and so has Pelosi.

They Did It

You have to go back and wonder why the Democrats made a fuss at all if it just led to this.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will present a plan to House Democrats for a war funding bill that won't include a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq but will feature benchmarks with consequences, according to Democratic leadership aides.

The bill also would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour from $5.15 per hour, and fund other domestic spending programs, which were still being negotiated [...]

The legislation would provide more than $90 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Leadership aides said the benchmarks would be tied to Iraq reconstruction aid and would require President Bush to present to Congress 18 reports before August.

They said Democrats won't give up on a deadline for pulling troops out of Iraq, hoping to write language into defense appropriations and defense authorization bills over the summer.

Ooh, Bush has to make reports! What's the penalty if he doesn't, a strongly worded letter?

This is exactly what Russ Feingold says it is, no matter how the leadership tries to pretty it up.

This situation is a collapse for Democrats. We had a strong start, pushed back against the President’s failed policy and held our ground that the supplemental should include binding language to end the war. But now, as Congress gets ready to send the President a bill that does nothing to get our troops out of Iraq, we are just folding our cards. As one person commented under Greg Sargent’s great post at TPM cafe, "Send the Congressional Dems over to my place for some poker - I could use a windfall right now."

This is no time to back down. This fight to end the war isn’t something that we can just put off or kick down the road [...] Why should this wait until September? First Americans had to put up with a Republican Congress that did nothing, and now we are faced with a Democratic Congress that is giving the President exactly what he wants – continuing his failed policy and leaving our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war. Some strategy. We can’t back down when the stakes are so high. I know you’ll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that’s exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.

The leadership is so far behind the American people it's scary. And their negotiating skills with the White House are non-existent. "We want a timeline." "No." "OK."

I don't know why they would raise the stakes by sending a funding bill with a timeline, only to lower the stakes afterward. That's just disheartening to your supporters. It just makes people angry, and I can't blame anyone who says "That's it, I'm done with the Democratic Party" after this. I'm not yet one of them, mainly because of the words of people like Feingold. But clearly this is very disappointing.

Why Rhetoric Matters

While David Obey in the New York Times claims that there is no deal on a war funding bill, other press reports are going with the AP's contention that a final bill will have no withdrawal timeline. CNN is talking about "benchmarks with consequences" but that's probably just spin. Since many Democrats would vote against a bill without a timeline, the leadership is trying to figure out if they should separate the minimum wage and spending programs out to give those progressive antiwar Representatives a chance to vote for them (um, DO that, please.)

I think that what this proves is that rhetoric matters. Democrats in Congress failed by talking so poorly about the war funding battle. The reason that polls show that Congress is holding back the funds is that Pelosi and Reid and Hoyer did a horrible job of combating that spin. It was clear to anyone who knows basic civics that the President was denying the funds, and there were plenty of lines of attack to make that point. People like Jim Webb and John Edwards were saying it, but the message was not unified.

We'll see how this plays out, but if this war continues, it will be because the Democrats lost the war of words.

UPDATE: Of course, when people like David Ignatius are seen as master rhetoriticians, it's no wonder that nobody in Washington can argue their way out of a paper bag. The "new way forward" in Iraq appears to be everything in the old way forward and instant contradictions like "no politicial reconciliation, but support top-down political reconciliation."

Speaking of Caves

I'm trying to figure out what universe makes it sensible to do this, if in fact this is what the Democrats are planning.

In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday.

The legislation would include the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade, a top priority for the Democrats who took control of Congress in January, the officials added.

Didn't the minimum wage increase pass with overwhelming support? Why would you need to throw it in the Iraq bill (and mute the political benefit) if it's veto-proof anyway? Wouldn't you want a big signing ceremony with a bunch of low-wage workers at the press conference? That's bad politics.

And the policy is, well, abominable. And any Presidential candidate who votes for it is going to have a hard time squaring with primary voters. I don't understand why Democratic leaders would make timetables FOR THEMSELVES in this debate by claiming that they have to give Bush a bill he can sign by Memorial Day? Isn't intransigence the proper response to intransigence? Especially when submission means more death, more destruction and less hope of any possible solution in Iraq?

This is essentially a "see you in September" maneuver, and I just don't buy the premise that the Republicans are going to head for the exits at that point.

While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising veto fight between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Democrats in both houses are expected to seek other opportunities later this year to challenge Bush's handling of the unpopular conflict.

Why you would give in to a lame duck President who's approval ratings have been in the 30s for well over a year is beyond me. The President's team has already disrespected the process by offering no compromise of their own. Yet the Dems are listening to the voices of High Broderism, claiming that they must copromise at all costs because it would simply be messy to do otherwise. I submit that a little messy is just what we need right now.

For the record, Democratic leaders are not confirming the story. I should hope not. It would be astonishingly stupid to do this.