Monday, May 12, 2008
Dems will soon have an "accountability moment" of their own -- when Bush asks Congress for another $100 billion for Iraq.
Jan 20, 2005 | When pressed by the Washington Post last week about why no one in his administration has been held accountable for the myriad failures in Iraq, President Bush sounded uncannily like Will Forte's petulant caricature on "Saturday Night Live": "Well, we had an accountability moment -- and that's called the 2004 election."
There was no word on whether the president then put his thumb on his nose and wiggled his fingers, or just went with the more efficient single middle finger.
In the next few weeks, Democrats in Congress will have an "accountability moment" of their own -- George Bush's request for another $80 billion to $100 billion in supplemental funding for the war in Iraq.
This will be the third time since the war began that the president has come to the Hill looking to refill his Iraqi coffers. The last two times, congressional Democrats helped rubber-stamp his requests, forking over $152 billion in military funding.
The time has come for Democratic leaders to say: "Not this time, Mr. President."
First they need to admit that they were wrong. Wrong to trust the president and wrong to allow him to put our troops in harm's way without a plan for post-Saddam Iraq, without significant allies (sorry, Bulgaria), and without an exit strategy.
It can be Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or the just-back-from-Iraq John Kerry or the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey -- but somebody with a (D) after his or her name needs to demand a straight answer to specific questions. Questions like: Mr. President, what are our long-term goals in Iraq? Are they realistic? How long will it take -- and how many more billions will have to be spent -- to reach them? What are our total casualty figures and how many more casualties are we willing to endure? Are we or are we not committed to a permanent presence there?
Democrats should begin the appropriations debate by demanding, at long last, a realistic assessment of the situation. While the president continues to sound like a happy-talk local weatherman, forever optimistic that the insurgency's torrential RPG and IED showers will soon be giving way to loads of sunny freedom and democracy, some high-profile Republicans -- perhaps looking to their legacies, or maybe just sick of the condescending lies -- are offering a gloomy forecast.
Outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, recently told the president, "We're losing." And Brent Scowcroft, the outgoing head of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, warned that the Iraqi elections "have the great potential for deepening the conflict." So which is it, Mr. President? Are we about to witness Iraq's 1776 (with Grand Ayatollah Sistani taking on the role of Thomas Jefferson) or about to find ourselves smack in the bloody middle of a Shiite vs. Sunni holy civil war?
Democrats should then demand that the president explain his exit strategy and how long he thinks it will take before our troops come home. The White House originally figured we'd be in and out before the flowers tossed at the liberators' feet had wilted. That fantasy soon gave way to the notion that things would be better once we captured Saddam. Then once sovereignty was transferred ("Let freedom feign!"). Then once elections were held.
Now they're certain they'll be better, uh, when they get better. "Clearly, we don't see the election itself as a pivotal point," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suddenly announced last week. "It's the beginning of a process where Iraqis will write a constitution and at the end of the year will actually vote for a permanent government." So now it's when Iraqis vote for a "permanent government" -- which is precisely what many Arabs in the Middle East are afraid of. As a high-ranking Jordanian official told me: "When the mullahs take over, the election will turn out to have been one person, one vote, one time."
The Democrats should also do everything in their admittedly diminished power to try to place some conditions on this next round of funding before they vote. That is, after all, their job. The one they've sworn an oath to do.
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