Democrats to Bush: No more troops to Iraq

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by C1ay

He needs funds to do that and Congress is threatening to withhold those funds.

Thanks for the reminder, C1ay. I just hope there is more balance in these checks and balances.

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

I just hope there is more balance in these checks and balances.

Me too. I don't like Congress playing Commander In Chief via blackmail...

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by C1ay

He needs funds to do that and Congress is threatening to withhold those funds.

And that's their constitutional role. This is not even a limitation, since he can authorize "emergency spending" which has actually been the *primary* method for funding the war so far! All this lack of authorized funding does is put him in the "embarrasing" position of blowing his authorized budget, it doesn't do anything to *stop* him.

Furthermore, the notion that a CEO can do anything they want without their board's approval is hogwash. No company is run that way, unless the CEO is also the majority shareholder and controls the board seats. I know Bush would like to see his "overwhelming mandate" as providing that, but few today would agree with that assessment.

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Which begs the question, is it time to rethink (and, potentially rework) the scope of the powers held by the US President...

No. The official powers are fine in my mind. The problem is that the Executive Branch has claimed and grabbed powers that they do not have any right to, and for six years the Congress has said "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." I actually think you can't blame Bush and Cheney for all of this: Congress willingly abdicated their constitutional role.

Not supporting the President is treason,
Buffy

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Buffy

All this lack of authorized funding does is put him in the "embarrasing" position of blowing his authorized budget, it doesn't do anything to *stop* him.

...a fact confirmed today by Sen. Joe Biden on Meet the Press:

Originally Posted by New York Times 1/7/07

Whether lawmakers are prepared to advocate legislative steps to withhold funds from an expanded mission is unclear. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday that as a practical matter, there was little that lawmakers could do to prevent Mr. Bush from expanding the American military mission in Iraq.

"You can't go in like a Tinkertoy and play around and say you can't spend the money on this piece and this piece," Mr. Biden said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press." "He'll be able to keep the troops there forever, constitutionally, if he wants to."

"As a practical matter," Mr. Biden added, "there is no way to say, 'Mr. President, stop.' "

Unquote,
Buffy

[InfiniteNow]

Bush takes blame in Iraq, adds troops - Yahoo! News

President Bush acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that he erred by not ordering a military buildup in Iraq last year and said he was increasing U.S. troops by 21,500 to quell the country's near-anarchy. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," Bush said.

"If we increase our support at this crucial moment and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home," Bush said. But he braced Americans to expect more U.S. casualties for now and did not specify how long the additional troops would stay.

Bush warned that the strategy would, in a short term he did not define, bring more violence rather than less.

Bush's blueprint would boost the number of U.S. troops in Iraq — now at 132,000 — to 153,500 at a cost of $5.6 billion. The highest number was 160,000 a year ago in a troop buildup for Iraqi elections.

The latest increase calls for sending 17,500 U.S. combat troops to Baghdad. The first of five brigades will arrive by next Monday. The next would arrive by Feb. 15 and the remaining would come in 30-day increments.

Bush also committed 4,000 more Marines to Anbar Province, a base of the Sunni insurgency and foreign al-Qaida fighters.

[paigetheoracle]

Lets put it like this....

For Iraq to calm down, the less done the better, military wise. What happened last year when more troops were sent in? More trouble was stirred up. George Bush is like a small child with a stick, who attacks a hornets wasp for fun and gets angry when he gets stung. The lesson is retire from engagement and let the hornets get on with their lives as best they can - not go after them with a bigger stick. This is a site for scientists and philosophers. Logic tells us how things work. We are (I hope) a practical breed. This means unlike politics or religion, we don't carehow things shouldbe, we only care how they are: If it works, do it - if it doesn't, don't try to force it to work because you believeit should.

I hate to say it but somebody like Rudi Guilliani might have got somewhere with the situation and if George had any sense, he might have hired him to come up with a plan and run it because it would be good for the country (Party politics is fine when everything is running well but during a disaster like this, it's all hands to the pumps: Even James Bond in 'Goldfinger' needed an expert to defuse the nuclear bomb strapped to his wrist. We are a community and work co-operatively. When we don't work together then the world falls apart around us as is happening now. Religion's job is to cement us together and those who stir up hatred pretending to be religious, show themselves to be anything but that by this yard stick. Their motives are worldy not spiritual because conflict binds us to a particular time and place (violence addiction or the trap of hate) and freedom of the individual is religions purpose (peaceful expansion not violent contraction).

The universe works by simple laws we can see working everyday. Even if we refuse to believe in them, that doesn't stop them working (Gallileo's defence - it is not religion versus science but hypocrisy versus truth).

[HydrogenBond]

One of the lesson from history that we learned, that may parallel the Iraqi situation is Viet Nam. America's presence introduced the more passive principles of democracy in South Viet Nam. When the toll became too high and America withdrew, literally millions were killed by those who maintained a more agressive philosophy toward war.

I realize America is not technically responsible for these past crimes against humanity, but our political intrusive followed by troop withdrawal helped set the stage for this to occur. If this was to happen in Iraq, who do we point the finger at, with respect to the subsequent crimes against humanity? It sort of analogous to someone going into a tense group, taking sides, polarizing the group further, and then letting them deal with the tension we helped amplify. When fighting breaks out we claim that we had no part in the matter since we were not there at that time.

The blame should be set squarely on American politics, with both sides taking the opposite approach, with this political polarization responsible for adding fuel to a smaller fire. If post Viet Nam happens in Iraq maybe we need to air lift Congress and Bush and drop them in the middle of the problem. There are plenty of entertainers to take their place. This next group might ne more careful about tranferring political opposition to other nations, if there is accountability.

[paigetheoracle]

If Iraq was an illness, what treatment would you prescribe as a physician? Would you try to cool the fever or enflame it, causing the patient to burn up and die? What if it was your child? What if you realized as some of us do, that we are all connected and it is foolish to think that nothing that goes on in this country and what we do is going to affect us? (Not in my backyard because the world is my backyard - disease spreads easily, especially since improved ability of people to travel as physical disease shows and mental dis-ease did with 9/11, Madrid and the London bombings.

Would you care about the rantings of such fevered brains as a doctor? No because you know the prescribed treatment will bring down the patients hot-headed nature and cure the problem, where the application of more heat will worsen it - this is the logic and science of the situation and why as I said in an earlier post on this subject, that Rudi Guillianiis more a scientist than GW in this respect: Bush doesn't learn what life is telling him about itself, Guilliani does and makes adjustments accordingly.

[HydrogenBond]

If we put things in perspective, the reason we enterred Iraq, was that Saddam was a brutal dictator, who decided the expand his borders. The first Pres. Bush kicked so butt. But the US owed Saddam a few favors, for helping fight Iran, years earlier, so he was left in power.

This action controlled Saddam's desire to expand his border, but he continued to take out his madness on his own people. I could never understand the terms "weapons of mass destruction". Isn't a 1000 lb bomb a weapon of mass descruction? Call me old fashion, but taking out a city block is mass descruction.

Irregardless, reinvading Iraq was in the best interests of the Iraq people. This second invasion deposed a dictator for crimes against humanity. The goal then was to introduce a more peaceful cultural environment. This is where the occupation came it.

What i would have done differently, was oust Saddam and then pull back and see what happens, internally. Let the new darkside consolidate power, show its organized defiance, so we know who the enemy is and where it hides. Then sneak back in and kick some butt again. Maybe do this treatment a couple of times until there aren't enough organized bad guys to cause more than social unrest. The Iraqi police can then take care of the rest.

Where we screwed up was not allowing the enemy to consolidate its forces so we know who is who. Our occupation kept them scattered making it harder to rid the country of the vermin. It is sort of like cockroaches. If you stay in the room with the lights on, they hide with only a few showing their faces. Turn off the lights and leave the room, they come out in forces. That's when you go back in to get them.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

If we put things in perspective, the reason we enterred Iraq, was that Saddam was a brutal dictator, who decided the expand his borders.

For Gulf War I this is absolutely true. For Gulf War II, the reasons were explicitly because he had WMD (meaning more than 1000lb bombs: Chemical Weapons! Nukes! Cruise Missiles!) and he had close ties to OBL who would use them on the US. Freeing the Iraqi from Saddam's dictatorship was only proffered *after* we found no WMD and no link to OBL.

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

The first Pres. Bush kicked so butt. But the US owed Saddam a few favors, for helping fight Iran, years earlier, so he was left in power.

Owed him favors? Hardly. He lost them irrevocably by invading Kuwait. We *did* owe favors to the Saudi's, and the Saudi's priorities were to avoid either a long US occupation or having to pick up the cost themselves. The issue, which Colin Powell strongly pushed at the time, was that the cost of "nation building" was huge.

This notion became a mantra for the Republican Congress in the 1990's, and the Clinton Administration even drew up plans for taking out Saddam for the same "humanitarian reasons" proffered by the Bush administration today, but was roundly voted down by not just the Democratic "peaceniks" but also the Repuplicans screaming "we don't do nation building." Unless its a Republican in the White House who is advocating it of course...

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

What i would have done differently, was oust Saddam and then pull back and see what happens, internally. Let the new darkside consolidate power, show its organized defiance, so we know who the enemy is and where it hides. Then sneak back in and kick some butt again.

I agree with this! This is actually what the Clinton plan was! The number one strategic error in the Bush Plan was Debaathification: If we'd just cut off the head and then "reeducated" the infrastructure of the Army, Police, Oil Ministry, etc., the chaos we've seen in the last 4 years would probably never have happened...

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

Our occupation kept them scattered making it harder to rid the country of the vermin. It is sort of like cockroaches. If you stay in the room with the lights on, they hide with only a few showing their faces. Turn off the lights and leave the room, they come out in forces. That's when you go back in to get them.

This is not a bad analogy. It was horrible strategy on our part to discount the warnings that Saddam had very complete plans to fight a war of insurgency: the rapid fall of Baghdad was a surprise, but the insurgency plan was started immediately.

Did you know that 10 of the most wanted on the infamous Iraqi Deck of Cards are still on the loose, almost assuredly leading the non-al Quaeda insurgency?

Learning from mistakes is hard,
Buffy