The Senate and the Iraq War Non-Debate
By Kent Manthie
Whither the Senate on the Iraq War policy? On Monday, February 6 the US Senate had a chance to do something bold and historic – they were all set to debate the Iraq War and the president’s escalation of such. This was to be a big step – a response to the outcry of the American People, who spoke loudly and clearly in the elections last November. But unfortunately, at the last minute, Republicans, who obviously couldn’t stomach having to defend Bush and the debacle that is set to spiral up and further out of control, in a childish display of oppositionist politics took their bat and ball and went home, so to speak, voting en bloc against cloture on the Warner/Levin resolution-turned-bill.
This is an outrage; how dare the Republicans obstruct the will of the majority of Americans? The mess in Iraq was front and center in the campaigns last summer and fall and the Democrats who won election and ousted all those Republican incumbents did so because of the opposition to the war, so why is it that things are not being done? One cannot blame Democrats, they are trying and trying really hard but the Republicans seek to derail this debating process at every turn.
When Democrats accused Republicans of cutting off any chance for debate the GOP leader said that they were all for debating the war; Mitch McConnell (R-KY), minority leader, had this to say about it: “We’re not trying to stop this debate; we just want to structure things in a way that’s fair to competing voices”. Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wasn’t buying any of it, though and neither was anyone who watched it on C-SPAN2-this was only a way of trying to change the subject if they couldn’t outright stop the debate.
Judd Gregg (R-NH) introduced a resolution of his own for which the GOP leadership decided to dump the McCain-Lieberman resolution. Gregg’s proposal has nothing to do with Bush’s escalation of troops; it neither endorses nor condemns any policy decisions made about Iraq, it only makes a gushing statement of support for the US armed forces in Iraq and says that the US Senate won’t cut off funding for them. This is pure obfuscation; a muddling up of the substance of what was supposed to take place and kudos to Harry Reid to standing up to it.
The Republicans were nothing if not slick, I’ll admit that – Mitch McConnell got up and made a “counteroffer”, trying to shift things around, he said the Republicans would be willing to go along with a vote on just the Warner/Levin resolution (which is now a bill, by the way, in order to be able to add amendments to it) and the Gregg resolution, but they would scrap the McCain-Lieberman resolution which gave support to the escalation and made some lip service to “benchmarks”; still, though, Reid stood fast – and good for him.
Well, I know things are not looking as rosy as they should be, despite or because of the election having come out the way it did. Americans were – are – visibly opposed to the occupation of Iraq – many of these lemmings were just a few years ago cheerleading the very same occupation but what with Americans being as naive and impressionable as they are were just recently told what to think in a new way, thus the polls have swung the other way in favor of getting out of Iraq.
But there are some of us who are not sitting back and taking the spoon-feeding that the lying government tries to foist on us through the colluding media types who frame the messages in such ways as to manipulate information and to even, on occasion, fabricate it.
I would say to those who are frustrated (still!) at the inaction of Congress and their inability to act on this mandate for ending the war to do something about the disastrous road this country is going down; take matters in your own hands, get out and take over the streets and shout at the top of all of your collective lungs; make a lot of noise and don’t give up. When a sufficient number show up and demand things happen then soon enough the rest of America will follow behind, just like every other popular movement and I would say to those who say that there was no mandate from the election because the results were too narrow that they don’t take into account that since such a small percentage of the eligible voters in this country actually vote – under 50% on average, maybe a bit higher in this last election – you have to look at other things like polls and such, which give an overall cross section of what people are thinking and the best ones are done with a high degree of scientific merit; therefore, to say that the election returns are too narrow to show a real mandate for change is to be blind to the throngs of popular support for ending the war out there in the streets of the cities across the USA.
America has a collectively short memory, it’s like the country itself is one giant pothead, thus having a burned-out short-term memory; so we can’t recall what we were doing just a little while ago – in this case three years ago – a long time for a person but a miniscule blip for a society – and in this smoky fog we, as Americans are stuck with leadership in this country that is just bumbling along, not studying past performance and not working on multiple plans for future success and stabilization of Iraq. Instead we’re just thinking about 3 minute pop songs and TV movies-of-the-week. It’s time that we as a people get out in the streets and make this vehement displeasure known.
Maybe it’s time we put down the pipe and got focused on how to make this world a better place for us and our children, because now things are just statically stagnant and getting progressively worse as our so-called leaders play childish games with each other and have nothing to offer as a solution except for meaningless platitudes and clichés; trite rhetoric that doesn’t do anything and petty backbiting that is a sign of immaturity and a conceit and pretentiousness that defies logic. – KM.