| Friday, June 16, 2006 |
| Why Democrats should vote against the sham House resolution, even if they get Rove'd for it |
Make no mistake, the House Democrats are being set up. The sham debate and vote on a non-binding resolution declaring Iraq to be part of the war on terror, and resolving to win said war, is meant fr the sole purpose of making Republicans look resolute and Democrats look weak going into the November elections. Republicans know that they have no issues going for them in November, and so they are pulling out the old Swiftie playbook: resolve to win a war they themselves have failed mightily to weigh in on or oversee for three years, and then dare the Democrats to vote against their "call for total victory." Well, there are three reasons Democrats should refuse to participate in this sham (which the Defense Department shamefully entered into as a political player yesterday, with that politicized memo they attempted to later withdraw) -- and why they should do so even if Republicans do as they always do: use those "no" votes to try and question the patriotism of Democrats in November.
1. Iraq is not now, nor has it ever been, the central front in the war on terror. It is the location of a U.S. led war to change a regime accused, not of terrorism, but of supposed nuclear and wmd proliferation. Currently, it is a modern day Vietnam -- where insurgents, aided (in many cases by unwanted) foreign fighters who use both terrorism and asymetrical warfare to fight what they see as an unjust occupation of their country by a foreign power. What we're fighting in Iraq isn't terrorism, it's insurgency. In fact, Iraq would not be the haven for the terrorists who are there now among the insurgents, had we not needlessly invaded the country in 2003. Bush wanted a dragon to fight, so that he and his team could implement their plan to launch the first resource war of the 21st century, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern said to us on the radio show yesterday. So they invaded Iraq, created Zarqawi, and then manipulated an intellectually lazy American public into going along with their absurd conflation of Iraq with 9/11. Democrats should not codify the GOP Iraq-terror lie by voting for its enshrinement into a resolution of the House.
2. Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terror attacks on America. Codifying that Rovian conflation in a useless, non-binding resolution won't make it so, but it will ratify the administration's three years of word and mind games. Democrats should refuse to go along.
3. Most experts believe that we are not winning the war on terror. And while a House bill resolving to do so at some point is a lovely idea, it won't do a single, solitary thing to turn that sad fact around. If Congress wants to do something substantive to win the war against radical Islamist terror, they should try acting like a co-equal branch of government, man up and start exercising oversight over the renegade bunch in the White House. Get control of the spending and then contracting corruption and then figure out how to better use those currently wasted resources to implement real foreign and anti-terrorism policy, domestic security, and intelligent law enforcement.
Democrats intrinsically know these things to be true. They should have the strength and integrity to stand up and say so, and to say no to the sycophants across the aisle who are wasting entire days of debate finding ways to craft language sufficiently obsequious to the president to make them look like the glowing court of a rarified war president (while still figuring out how not to campaign with said war president in the fall.)
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Tags: Iraq, Congress, Democrats, Republicans, Politics, Bush, Karl Rove |
posted by JReid @ 11:05 AM   |
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