House passes war appropriations bill - Chimpy throws a hissy fit

Can this thing get any more meaningless?

 

Make a resolution to end funding, and then stand by it. You know, the Constitutional way.

Oh, wait. That requires integrity. Keeping your word. Not much of that on Capitol Hill.

 

The call for Dems to cut funding, and make it cut and dry seems disingenuous.

On one hand people accuse the Democratic majority of playing politics and not being willing to reach accross the aisle. People are sick of congress not being able to get things done, and the stalemates.

So when the Dems try and structure bills that include compromises, and something that would be more acceptable to both sides in an effort to get the measures to pass, they are accused of not having any integrity.

It seems what the critics really want is for Dems to propose cutting funding, so the meaningless accusations of not supporting the troops would finally have the appearance of being at least a little bit legitimate.

I think trying to bait the Dems into proposing a resolution cutting funding for the troops is a low-down political move.

 

Passing a toothless bill with a meaningless deadline is disingenuous. The Democratic leadership is not interested in getting the troops home. They just want to slough what's left of the blame. They want to be able to tell their constituents that they voted to bring the troops home, when they did no such thing.

D&D. Details, Details.

 

well said.

 

Does that mean that the withdrawl dates are non-binding? The previous info that you, MC Mark, posted don't seem to state that.

 

^ If the langauge is non-binding then I will have less problems with it from a Constitutional standpoint. I would still feel better if this had been passed as a separate non-binding resolution but if they aren't writing a binding resolution into a funding bill but just adding langauge to make a statement that would avoid overstepping the Commander and Chief powers.

 

so its a non-binding, vague bill...sweet.

 

If it is non-binding then I would say the Admin's and their allies are making a big political mistake and their rhetoric has painted themselves into a corner on this one.

A non-binding resolution has no practical bearing on the whether troops are withdrawn or not. The Admin. could just go along with a non-binding resolution that has vague benchmarks of goals and even spin that as their own desire to see the war ended in a reasonable manner. Even when the dates come up for the benchmarks the Admin. could then argue that those haven't been met but progress has been made and ride out Iraq until the end of GW Bush's term.

The problem is that their rhetoric has forced them into being unable to accept anything that even mentions withdrawl.

 

Excellent!

 

Sorry, that's just my analysis. Read the details of any version of the bill and try to shelve your bias. You'll come to the same conclusion.

 

Who's 'micromanaging' Iraq? It depends

Posted by Frank James at 9:18 am CDT

An oft-repeated line of attack by President Bush and other Republicans against Congress's majority party is that congressional Democrats seeking to impose a timeline for U.S. operations in Iraq want to tell generals what to do.

"I believe strongly that politicians in Washington shouldn't be telling generals how to do their job," President Bush told said into the news cameras Monday.

A related Republican charge against Democrats is that the party that controls Congress wants to "micromanage" the war. The word is said with such constancy it's a verbal confetti now landing all over the place in Washington, on talk shows, everywhere.

One could hope that all of this would trigger an informative public debate about the proper role and nature of civilian control over the military in American democracy. So far, it hasn't.

Clearly the president doesn't really believe Washington politicians shouldn't tell generals how to do their jobs since he himself is a Washington politician who just also happens to be commander-in-chief.

Among the widely acknowledged strengths of the American Republic is the historic subordination of the military to civilian rule required by the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers would've wholeheartedly agreed with French statesman Georges Clemenceau that "war is too important to be left to the generals."

While some academics have expressed concern over what they view as a troubling assertiveness among the top military brass in recent years, especially during the Clinton Presidency when Gen. Colin Powell was accused of doing end-runs around the president, that's nowhere near to saying that the military has become an independent and rogue part of the government.

In fact, the U.S. military prides itself on upholding its constitutional obligation to abide by civilian authority.

Of course, there've been famous cases of insubordination, such as when President Abraham Lincoln would urge Gen. George McClellan to attack Confederate forces only to have the general blithely ignore him. Or when President Harry Truman had to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to attack China during the Korean War when Truman didn't, for openly defying him.

So Bush must mean something much different such as Washington politicians, like those in Congress, shouldn't be setting military strategy, that it's the province of the president in his role as commander-in-chief to do so.

In that, the president has a strong case. In American history, it is the president who usually sets military strategy or oversees it, signs off on the military's operational plans, replaces generals and so on.

Congress has usually only been able to exert its influence on the president's exercise of his role as commander-in-chief through the power of the purse and as a Congressional Research Service report indicates it's only had limited success in doing that since 1970.

If congressional Democrats really want to end the U.S. military's involvement in what they say is a growing Iraqi civil war, history argues that they'll have to go the route of stopping funding.

But congressional Democrats clearly don't have the votes now to do that. Even if they did, there'd be skittishness about such a move since it would leave them politically exposed to the powerfully damaging charge of abandoning U.S. troops during wartime.

Which is why Congress will be debating and voting today and tomorrow on legislation that merely suggests a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

The micromanaging allegation of Republicans is interesting because it is exactly the charge retired generals leveled at Pentagon civilians, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, before the Iraq War started and throughout until he was forced out late last year.

For instance, this from a story published in the Washington Post on March 30, 2003, shortly after the war started.

More than a dozen officers interviewed, including a senior officer in Iraq, said Rumsfeld took significant risks by leaving key units in the United States and Germany at the start of the war. That resulted in an invasion force that is too small, strung out, underprotected, undersupplied and awaiting tens of thousands of reinforcements who will not get there for weeks.

"The civilians in [Rumsfeld's office] vetoed the priority and sequencing of joint forces into the region -- as it was requested by the war fighters -- and manipulated it to support their priorities," said an officer who asked not to be quoted by name. "When they did this, it de-synchronized not only the timing of the arrival of people and their organic equipment, but also the proper mix of combat, combat support and combat support units."
Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said yesterday that he told a senior member of Rumsfeld's staff shortly before the war that the secretary's office had to stop meddling in the deployment process and let Army commanders have the units they believed they needed to fight the war.

Rumsfeld, McCaffrey said, "sat on each element for weeks and wanted an explanation for every unit called up out of the National Guard and Reserve, and argued about every 42-man maintenance detachment. Why would a businessman want to deal with the micromanagement of the force? The bottom line is, a lack of trust that these Army generals knew what they were doing."

Three years later, in 2006 Lt. Gen. Charles Swannack, former head of the 82nd Airborne, joined the growing chorus of retired generals accusing Rumsfeld of gumming up the works in Iraq by meddling.

This from an April 2006 report on CNN's website:

Swannack is critical of Rumsfeld's management style. "Specifically, I feel he has micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces there," Swannack said in the telephone interview.
"And I believe he has culpability associated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and, so, rather than admitting these mistakes, he continually justifies them to the press ... and that really disallows him from moving our strategy forward."

Swannack, who served more than 30 years in the Army, said part of the problem at the Pentagon is
Rumsfeld's system of promoting senior leaders.

"If you understand what Secretary Rumsfeld has done in his time in the Pentagon, he personally is the one who selects the three-star generals to go forward to the president for the Senate to confirm."
Swannack also criticized the way the war was being run before he retired.

Of course, President Bush steadfastly defended Rumfeld against micromanagement and other charges, ad did congressional Republicans, until after last year's mid-term elections.

So could it be one conclusion to take away from this is that micromanaging, like beauty, is all in the eye of he beholder?

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2007/04/whos_micromanag.html

 

^ Micromanaging a foreign war from Washington is probably not a good idea whether it is done by the Executive or Legislative branch but the difference is that the Constitution empowers the Executive to manage war.