Democrats War Now

Yeah, it’s official - - What once Democrats could argue was “Bush’s war,” is the Democrats war now. On June 16^th, “in a vote that should go down in recent histories as a day of shame for the Democrats,” according to the writer Jeremy Scahill, 221 Democrats and 5 Republicans backed the Obama administration’s $106 billion supplemental appropriation bill to maintain the occupation of Iraq, escalate the quagmire that is Afghanistan, enlarge the bombing and death into Pakistan and “fund the International Monetary Funds anti-social policies of forcing developing countries to sacrifice programs for the poor in order to bail out big banks.

It was quite a day for Obama and Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership. Only 32 Democrats, most associated with Progressive Democrats of America, had the courage to vote their convictions. Not one of the 32 was from the state of Washington, certainly not our war-mongering Congressman, Norm Dicks. Those 32 Democrats faced “significant threats to their political future from the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” “The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership played a very dirty game in their effort to ram through the funding,” reports Scahill. Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the antiwar Democrats, said the White House is threatening to withdraw support from freshmen who oppose the bill, saying, “you’ll never hear from us again.” She said the House leadership was also targeting freshmen. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the right-wing, former congressman from Illinois, was reported “cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes,” supporting the supplemental war funding.

Anybody remember the 2006 elections? That was the election when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi asked us to vote for Democrats because the Democrats would end the war. Democrats took over the Congress in that election and then pulled a bait-and-switch by not only not ending the war but escalating it. They voted for war funding supplemental after war funding supplemental. They told us they could not overcome the unpopular Bush. Well, Bush is gone so what is their excuse now? “We’ve got to give Obama’s war a chance?” “This vote,” Scahill writes, “revealed a sobering statistic for the anti-war movement in this country and brought to the surface a broader issue that should give die-hard partisan Democrats who purport to be anti-war reason for serious pause about the actual state of their party.” “Under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic-controlled Congress has been a house of war. Unfortunately, it is not a house where the war is one of noble Democrats fighting for peace, freedom and democracy. . . . Instead, it is a house void of substantive opposition to the ever-expanding war begun under Bush and escalating under Obama.”

If the first casualty of war is truth, the second should surely be the destruction of “patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory” in which war comes wrapped. Except for the 32, the hands of the Democratic members of Congress who have made Bush’s wars their own will now be forever stained by the blood of those whom they sent to die and those who will be killed by our soldiers. “War from a distance,” writer Chris Hedges recalled recently, “seems noble.” But, “war is always about betrayal,” Hedges concludes. “It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians.”

Six Years of War

Three days from now, on the 19^th of March, the United States invasion of Iraq will mark its sixth year.  A million dead Iraqis, more than 4,000 dead U.S. military persons, an eventual cost, according to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, of 3 trillion dollars.  For what?

Many people who voted for President Obama believed, quite irrationally as far as I’m concerned, that once elected, Obama would remove all U. S. troops from Iraq within sixteen months.  I said many times on my radio program that Obama was being too clever by half with his semantics about withdrawal.  He said then, and he confirmed my worst suspicions a couple weeks ago, that he would remove “combat” troops from Iraq, as if every service person there is not in combat.  His intension during the campaign, confirmed in a late February speech, was to leave thousands of U.S. military personnel in Iraq beyond the now 19 month period of his supposed withdrawal.  50,000 troops to be exact.  Non-combat troops to be sure.  I suspect that by the time August 2011 rolls around the 50,000 will have grown considerably, more in line with the 60 to 90,000 I predicted during the campaign. 

According to the withdrawal agreement drawn up by W. and his puppet in Iraq, the United States must have all troops out of Iraq by the end of 2012 - - just in time for the November 2012 election.  Don’t count on it.

The speech Obama gave at the end of February could very well have been delivered by W.  We found no mention in the speech of the on-going and worsening conflict between the Shia and the Kurds that will undermine any Iraqi government.  We heard no mention of what is now to happen to the Suni forces the United States has been paying not to kill U. S. soldiers for the last two years. 

According to the highly respected military correspondent Tom Ricks, author of The Gamble, Obama’s plan for exiting Iraq is the “sixth plan he has covered that attempts to get U. S. forces out of Iraq.”  Mr. Ricks warns in his book that tBush’s war is about to engulf Obama.  He writes that the United States will be in Iraq for many years to come, “and that in the end, we will be the losers.”  What will emerge, Ricks told MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, “is not a democracy, not an American ally, run by a strongman, probably tougher, smarter and more adept than Saddam Hussein and who is, ironically, an even worse guy.”  The winners, as far as I’m concerned, are the mullahs in Iran who will be quite content to have the war continue to bleed billions from the United States every month.

If you are concerned about the continued occupation of Iraq and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, join with your fellow citizens for an anti-war vigil on Thursday, 19 March, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm at Zelasko Park.