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 Editorials | Issues | February 2007 
US Democrats Signal a Wider Battle Lasting the Rest of President's Term
 Peter Baker - Washington Post
| | Part kindly Irish Catholic grandfather and part political pit bull with two Purple Hearts in his pocket, Rep. John Murtha seems the Democrats’ best chance of using the budget to curtail the war without appearing to be leaving troops in the lurch. (Dennis Cook/AP) |
After enjoying great deference in the conduct of national security for his first six years in office, President Bush now faces an assertive opposition Congress that has left him on the defensive. The nonbinding resolution passed on a largely party-line vote seems certain to be the first of a series of actions that will challenge Bush for the remainder of his presidency.
At stake is not just Bush's decision to send an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq, the plan specifically renounced by the resolution. By extension, the 246 to 182 vote passed judgment on Bush's overall stewardship of the war in Iraq and, more broadly, of his leadership in the world. At a time when the president is confronting Iran over its nuclear enrichment program, the House vote demonstrates that he has far less latitude to take aggressive action than he might have had in the past.
"This is an important moment," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And it's an important moment not only about what's in the past, or even in the present, but also what might be happening in the future."
The resolution, he said, "tells the president that the country's increasingly tired of the war and the country's reaction to his provoking a new war would be even worse."
Both sides recognized that the House vote, along with a Senate vote scheduled for today, represents the opening salvo in a more protracted struggle. "To me, this is kind of a baby step. It doesn't have teeth," said David J. Rothkopf, author of "Running the World," a book on the making of modern foreign policy. "The real question is going to be whether the Democratic leadership goes further and challenges funding, because that's where Congress historically has been able to show its influence."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her close adviser, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), are devising a strategy to tie Bush's hands by placing conditions on future funding for the war, such as requiring any units sent to Iraq to meet certain standards for training, equipment and rest between deployments. Because those conditions might be hard to meet, they could slowly constrict Bush's ability to keep up troop levels.
But yesterday's vote signaled peril for the Democratic congressional leadership as well. Despite deep Republican discontent with the course of the war, Democrats were unable to persuade more than 17 members of the president's party to register that dissatisfaction with their votes. If Democratic leaders could not build a broader bipartisan coalition for a symbolic vote, it may prove much harder to attract Republican support for proposals to limit Bush's options in Iraq.
Many Democratic strategists remain allergic to repeating the finale of the Vietnam War, when Congress voted to cut funds for the South Vietnamese government and the nation fell to the North in 1975. For years afterward, Democrats have struggled to shed the image of being soft on defense, which is why they were so eager to bring along more Republicans yesterday.
The White House privately pressed that point with wavering Republicans. Even as Bush - resigned to the resolution's certain passage and consoled that it carried no substantive force - publicly made little effort to oppose the measure, aides such as national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley lobbied GOP lawmakers to stick with the president to avoid emboldening Democrats down the line. If Republicans went along this time, Hadley and others argued, it would send a message to Pelosi and Murtha that they could go even further in attaching conditions to the emergency war-spending measure soon to be considered by Congress.
Administration allies warned about the precedent beyond Bush as well. "If Congress proceeds to throttle the president's strategy, then it will seriously undercut the ability of future presidents to do what they need to do to protect the nation in a time of war," said James Phillips, a foreign policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation. "It's a mistake to think you can effectively run a war by committee."
The president and Congress have wrestled to balance national security since the founding of the nation. The first congressional investigation back in 1792 when George Washington was president looked into a botched military operation against Native Americans. Congress challenged the White House during the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, rejected the Treaty of Versailles negotiated by Woodrow Wilson after World War I, and tried to keep Franklin D. Roosevelt from aiding allies facing threats from Nazi Germany.
The clash between branches came to a head during Vietnam, when Congress rescinded the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that Lyndon B. Johnson used to justify escalation. A measure to cut off money for the war was rejected in 1970 but increased pressure on Richard M. Nixon to turn fighting over to the South Vietnamese. As Nixon withdrew U.S. forces, Congress in 1973 cut off funding for "offensive" operations, in effect ratifying what by then was the president's stated course. A 1974 vote cut aid to South Vietnamese forces by 50 percent after U.S. forces were already gone, leading to the fall of Saigon.
Tension between the executive and legislative branches over national security has percolated since then. Congress restricted Ronald Reagan from funding the contra rebels in Nicaragua, and the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty submitted by Bill Clinton. But it had not reached the Vietnam level until yesterday.
"There's always been a lot of dissent in wartime," said Senate historian Donald A. Ritchie. Sometimes, as in Vietnam, it takes a while to build, he added: "There's a certain point when everybody marches together. They were very much united with Johnson in '65 and '66. But when the war turned bad, that's when they broke away. The same was true in the Civil War, and the same was true in any protracted war when things didn't go well."
Iraq War Draws Nays in State Capitols
Joshua Brockman - Stateline
Discontent with President Bush's call for bolstering U.S. troops in Iraq not only is flaring in Congress but also is beginning to surge in state capitols.
The U.S. House is expected to vote Friday (Feb. 16) on a nonbinding resolution against Bush's plans for a troop surge in Iraq. But the first legislative bodies in the nation to lash out at the war were the Democratic-controlled Vermont Legislature, which passed a resolution Tuesday (Feb. 13) calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the Democratic-controlled California Senate, which adopted a measure Feb. 13 against an increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq.
Another legislative body controlled by the Democrats, the Iowa Senate, adopted a resolution on Thursday (Feb. 15) critical of an escalation. Measures calling on Congress and the president not to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq have been introduced in another 20 state capitols.
Governors are beginning to make their voices heard as well, largely to raise their concerns over the Pentagon's heavy reliance on part-time soldiers in the National Guard, whose state-based units serve at the direction of governors until called to active duty by the president.
Although the U.S. Constitution gives federal lawmakers the power and purse strings to wage war, the unprecedented use of National Guard troops is making the four-year-old conflict a local concern for governors and state legislatures nationwide. While unable to change the execution of the war, state politicians are able to amplify pressures on Congress, which can.
The National Guard is the chief flash point between the Bush administration and governors when it comes to the war. Governors rely on Guard units in time of natural disasters, such as snowstorms or hurricanes, and communities face the loss of employees, many from vital services such as police and fire departments. Of 3,122 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, 468 were from National Guard units, according to the Department of Defense and the Army National Guard.
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) opposes the president's call for a surge, said spokeswoman Liz Boyd.
A day after the announcement that 3,500 Oklahoma Army National Guard soldiers in the 45th Infantry Brigade would head to Iraq in the largest mobilization of the state's soldiers since the Korean War, Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry (D) told The Associated Press that the Defense Department had essentially reinstated "the draft on the backs of National Guard units throughout the country."
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) wrote to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressing her disappointment at the decision to extend the tour of duty of Kansas National Guard members in Iraq by four months and requesting hardship pay of $1,000 per month, commensurate with what full-time soldiers receive after serving one year in Iraq. Republican Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter of Idaho, who is a former member of the 116th Cavalry Brigade, said that 18 months in Iraq was enough for his former National Guard outfit. In a news release, he said he doubted his state's unit would be called to fill the troop surge in Iraq because of a lack of equipment and a need for retraining. But he also said he "would certainly make a personal and persuasive argument to the president that our men and women have gone above and beyond."
When asked about the Defense Department's outreach to governors, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D), who is also chair of the National Governors Association, told Stateline.org that she has had "good communication" with the top brass in the National Guard and Army especially concerning "Operation Jumpstart," a deployment of 6,000 guardsmen in the Southwest to help stop illegal border crossings in an initiative funded by the Department of Defense.
Still, she added that "the Pentagon as a whole needs to understand that the Guard has responsibilities in addition to being active duty foot soldiers in Iraq."
Two governors who just stepped down and now are running for president also have taken issue with Bush for the war's toll on the National Guard.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said there is "a growing impatience" in the United States over anything that impacts National Guard units. The death of a National Guard soldier has a different impact on communities "because a few months ago that soldier was coaching soccer or teaching Sunday school," he said in an interview with Stateline.org.
On Feb.10, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) wrote an Op-ed article in The Washington Post calling on Congress to "act immediately" to bring home U.S. troops from Iraq and deplored how the war has depleted the military and National Guard units.
In state legislatures, an advocacy group called Progressive States Network has been pushing local lawmakers to introduce nonbinding resolutions or send letters to Washington, D.C., against any surge in U.S. troops for Iraq.
"A big goal of this is to raise public pressure," said Joel Barkin, executive director of the network. "It's to localize this issue. This is not just a Washington issue - this is an issue that affects every local community in America." The network is working in concert with Americans against Escalation in Iraq, whose members include MoveOn.org, Service Employers International Union (SEIU) among others who are pressing Congress to act.
Some of the resolutions, such as Senate Joint Resolution No. 9 introduced in Montana on Jan. 31 by state Sen. Steven Gallus (D), cite a laundry list of hardships endured as a result of National Guard deployments including "lost lives, combat injuries, psychic trauma, disruption of family life, financial hardship for individuals, families and businesses, interruption of careers, and damage to the fabric of civic life in our communities."
A recent snafu that left some Iowa units in Iraq to find out from Web sites and family members that their overseas duties had been extended also didn't sit well and led state Sen. Tom Hancock (D) to write a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Some legislators are taking the campaign a step further: On Wednesday, Washington state Sen. Eric Oemig (D) introduced a resolution that asks Congress to consider impeachment investigations for President Bush and Vice President Cheney surrounding the U.S. invasion and ongoing presence in Iraq. A similar measure was introduced in New Mexico. |
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