Hello and cheers! I’m Alpha, and I’m a blogger.
I’ll be responsible for the lion’s share of the national and international commentary hereabouts. And where to start but with Iraq news, if we can call it that.
We’ll begin at the Democratic debate in New Hampshire last night, with John Edwards fairly skewering Senators Clinton and Obama for caving in the recent supplemental spending showdown. Said Edwards, “…they went quietly to the floor of the Senate, cast the right vote. But there is a difference between leadership and legislating.” Both Obama and Clinton did vote as Edwards would have had them–to refuse to send Mr. Bush a bill without timelines. They failed to get in front of the issue, where they might have been able to actually get the original supplemental back before the President.
Of course this is what most of us out on the wacky fringes of the Big Scary New Left would like. Send the President the same legislation, with the same timelines as many times as you can. As soon as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell starts dragging his feet you call him a coward and a shill for the White House and watch him collapse like a flan in a cupboard. Right?
“Sometimes, son,” my dad said to me when I was small, “being upstanding means having to stand up.” So sure, I’d love to see the same supplemental passed ten or fifteen times this year. Congress could spend every single day of the session debating and passing the same piece of legislation, and Mr. Bush would be so thoroughly emasculated he’d start to sound like Paris Hilton.
Before we jump into that one with both feet let’s back up a little and consider the situation as any responsible person must: compare the odds of all possible outcomes and the positive and negative effects of those possible outcomes. On the one hand there’s the possibility that, upon seeing the bill the second, third, or twelfth time, Mr. Bush would back down. That seems like a relatively slim chance, but it’s recursive, so we’ll call that about a 10% percent probability. Boy, that’d be great, right? Totally worth all of the risks!
But soft! On the other hand, we could be faced with a Congress that literally did nothing for fifteen months while Mr. Bush’s veto pen would run low on ink and his approval numbers would start to rival Satan’s. I’d give that one maybe 5%.
On yet another hand (Alpha possesses many, many hands), there is the remarkably high probability that the majorities which passed the supplemental would eventually come apart like a brontosaurus on reentry. They simply did not have the majorities they would need to run this kind of reverse filibuster. On the second or the ninth attempt, the bill would get stopped. While that might not bother most of the other hip New Lefters out there, it does bother me.
There are a few lessons that everyone who’s going to run a Congress needs to learn. I’m looking at you, sir. One of these lessons is about coaltions. Coalitions are what majorities are made of, and are therefore tremendously important. Coalitions are hard to build, and harder to rebuild, while easy to fracture. For Democrats in particular this is a very important point, since leading Dems has frequently been likened to rustling felines. If this Congress is going to get anything at all done, we can’t afford to do this one thing.
So, sadly, I have to throw up my hands. We didn’t try sending the bill back to Mr. Bush, but it wasn’t likely to work anyway.
Oh, and in case all this discussion has got you wondering if maybe, just maybe the Democrats aren’t worth the delicate blends their suits are made from and this whole occupation of Iraq might just be the way to go, we have word from Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. It turns out that the end is truly in sight! He went on “ABC’s This Week” and told Steph he was pretty sure the Iraqi military would be ready to go by the end of 2008. Awesome, right? So all our brand new President would have to do is nod sometime toward the end of January and peace shall be upon us. Wonderf–wait, wait. UPI’s first grabbed quote: “We are committed to do something tangible within (the) next weeks and months.” Wow. These guys learned an awful lot from Tom DeLay, didn’t they?
Bonus points go to the first reader who can tell me when and where Mr. Talabani first said that the Iraqi military would be fully operational in less than two years. TalkLeft takes the prize:
Sunday, April 10, 2005 Posted: 6:20 PM EDT (2220 GMT) BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The newly elected president of Iraq said Sunday he expects that U.S. troops will be gone from his country within two years. Jalal Talabani told CNN two years should be enough time for Iraqi forces to rebuild and secure control of the country as well as take over the job currently being performed by some 140,000 U.S. troops.
So, Mr. Talabani, you said two years ago that you needed two years. Now you say you need another twenty months. The Iraqi military is on a pace to be trained, armed and ready to go some time before the first of Never!
The Iraqi government is widely held in Iraq to be a puppet to American interests. Not surprising, really, since Iraqis aren’t stupid. We provide funding for their parliament, we provide policing and we participate in their combat. Great, right? Not for the Iraqis, as it turns out. They don’t want to be vassals, I guess. And none of the factions can stand the idea of subservience to any of the others. We’ve got a civil conflict with at least 15 seperate organizations fighting on 2, 3, and sometimes 4 teams, in a country with worse water, worse roads, less power and no economy to speak of. Nearly all of the professionals in Iraq’s government were purged as part of the US-mandated de-Baathification, and no one can seem to figure out why the anti-occupation factions have so few supply problems.
Iraq is beyond war, beyond occupation, beyond clusterfuck. Iraq is beyond words. People are dying, and they will continue to die until someone in Iraq, of Iraq, can offer them some kind of solution. While I do feel we owe it to the Iraqi people to help them solve the problems we created we can’t do that from where we are now. It’s time we got our dog out of this fight.