It's time to bring U.S. troops out of Iraq
By Senator Russ Feingold - WI
With so many Americans now calling for our troops to come home from Iraq, it's hard to understand what is standing in the way of more members of Congress supporting an end to this disastrous war.
One of the biggest obstacles to ending the war isn't a matter of policy, but a matter of facts giving way to fiction. The facts are simple: Congress can bring our troops out of Iraq by setting a date after which funds for the war will be terminated, forcing the safe redeployment of our troops before that deadline.
The fiction, however, is that instead of safely redeploying our troops, efforts to end funding for the war would somehow leave our troops stranded on the battlefield without the support and supplies they need.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The safety of our servicemen and women in Iraq is paramount. It's a myth that ending funding for the war puts our troops in harm's way.
Congress will continue to give our troops the resources and support they need as long as they are on the ground, but by specifying a time after which funding for the war would end, it can force the president to bring the troops home.
As former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger recently testified before Congress about this approach to ending the war, "There would not be one penny less for benefits of the troops" and "there would not be one penny less for supplies or support."
The Senate took a similar approach in 1993, when Senators overwhelmingly supported efforts to cut off funding for the flawed military mission in Somalia.
Without question, Somalia in 1993 differs in many ways from Iraq in 2007, from the scope of the mission to the reason for that mission in the first place. What hasn't changed, however, is Congress's constitutional power to end a military mission, and its ability to use that power without endangering the safety of our brave troops.
Our troops in Iraq have done their job professionally and heroically. But we cannot afford to keep sending our servicemen and women into a war that was started -- and is maintained -- on false pretenses.
An indefinite presence of U.S. military personnel in Iraq will not fix that country's political problems.
Keeping our brave troops in Iraq indefinitely is also having a devastating impact on our national security and military readiness.
We are weakening, not strengthening, our national security by continuing to pour a disproportionate level of our military and intelligence and fiscal resources into Iraq.
The president refuses to acknowledge this reality, and has no intention of reversing the current misguided, open-ended mission. But Congress can heed the call of Americans and do what the president refuses to do: End the war.
I recently joined with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in offering an amendment to end funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, by the end of March 2008.
I was very pleased that a majority of the Senate's Democratic caucus, including Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, supported that effort. To bring our troops out of Iraq, we simply need more members of Congress to do the same.
It's time to separate fact from fiction in the Iraq debate. Everyone wants to make sure that our troops in the field get everything they need. We owe our troops a tremendous debt of gratitude, and we will never leave them high and dry. That support is absolutely consistent with efforts in Congress to safely redeploy the troops by using Congress' power of the purse to end the war.
In the November elections, the American people made it clear that they want our troops out of Iraq, and it is up to Congress to respond. Congress must not allow the president to continue a war that has already come at such a terrible cost.
It's time for Congress to end this devastating war, and finally bring American troops out of Iraq.
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Beach Fanatic
I'd argue that the American people wanted to punish the GOP for corruption and pork more than Iraq, but that's another topic. Also, as Feingold is calling us to end intervention in one theatre, he's screaming that we should increase it in another. He's made no mention of how to handle Sudan, other than increased diplomatic pressure. Nor does he address what he's prepared to do if the Security Council won't authorize sanctions. Here's a good article by Bill Buckley.
Honor, Duty, Country?
By William F. Buckley Jr.
While it is true that no historical event exactly replicates another, it is certainly the case that what happened in Vietnam in 1972-1975 bears very closely on the current situation in Iraq.
To truncate the story drastically, what happened back then was the result of the correlation of four strategic factors.
1) Hanoi?s resolution to conquer the south. The North Vietnamese were held back by the failure of their spring offensive in 1972. That offensive was weakened by U.S. mining of the harbors and by the reluctance of China, in the swoon of the Nixon visit to Mao, to give full-bodied support to an invasion. But Hanoi simply bided its time. 2) The withdrawal by the United States, ending in March 1973, of a combative military presence. Only a few hundred U.S. advisors were left in South Vietnam. 3) The growing stability of the South Vietnamese government, which was assumed competent to carry out the terms of the Paris agreements of 1973. These agreements had been negotiated in dozens and dozens of meetings between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. The agreements called for the removal of U.S. forces, the cessation of North Vietnamese offensives, and recognition of the Saigon government as the ruling political entity in the south. And 4) the progressive disunity of the United States government. Here we had the anti-war movement as a continuing force. But that movement attained dominance pari passu with the weakening of President Nixon. As Watergate metastasized from a "second-rate burglary" into grounds for the removal of a president, U.S. support for success in Vietnam wilted.
The parallels in the current situation are plain, beginning with the nature of the United States? participation. What we have right now is a progressively immobilized executive and a dissenting legislature, leading ? inevitably ? to an impotent military.
The question immediately posed is: Do we feel responsibility for what happens in the period ahead? The Iraqi government resembles the government of South Vietnam in 1973-4 in that Baghdad is fighting, as Saigon fought, for a political system free of overweening foreign elements. But Saigon could not hold out in the long run without U.S. military support, and neither can Baghdad.
If the parallels hold, i.e., if the result of failure in the Middle East is equivalent to the result of failure in Indochina, then we would expect to see the collapse of the Maliki government in Baghdad, some kind of bloody vengeance against Iraqis who had supported that government, and a people subjugated by a regime that sits on one percent the world?s supply of oil and is unlikely to proceed indifferent to the march, by Iraq?s eastern neighbor, to becoming a nuclear power.
In the currency of human deaths, it is unlikely that we would match in Iraq what we stood by for in Vietnam. The statistics aren?t even there, to count accurately the casualties of defeat in that theater. But the most graphic symbol is the picture of Vietnamese, young and old, clinging to a U.S. helicopter in the desperate, final hope to be taken away from those waiting to torture and kill them. As stated, the statistics are not final, but somewhere between a quarter million and two or even three million Vietnamese suffered from our flight from the burden we first had undertaken, and then abandoned.
Dr. Kissinger has said that the use of the American fleet to contain the invasion of 1975 could have saved the day. What could save the day in Iraq? Nothing short of public revulsion channeled toward those Democrats who are measuring these days the political value of honor. In the election ahead, all the world will be looking over our shoulders, including the ghosts of Vietnam.
Honor, Duty, Country?
By William F. Buckley Jr.
While it is true that no historical event exactly replicates another, it is certainly the case that what happened in Vietnam in 1972-1975 bears very closely on the current situation in Iraq.
To truncate the story drastically, what happened back then was the result of the correlation of four strategic factors.
1) Hanoi?s resolution to conquer the south. The North Vietnamese were held back by the failure of their spring offensive in 1972. That offensive was weakened by U.S. mining of the harbors and by the reluctance of China, in the swoon of the Nixon visit to Mao, to give full-bodied support to an invasion. But Hanoi simply bided its time. 2) The withdrawal by the United States, ending in March 1973, of a combative military presence. Only a few hundred U.S. advisors were left in South Vietnam. 3) The growing stability of the South Vietnamese government, which was assumed competent to carry out the terms of the Paris agreements of 1973. These agreements had been negotiated in dozens and dozens of meetings between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. The agreements called for the removal of U.S. forces, the cessation of North Vietnamese offensives, and recognition of the Saigon government as the ruling political entity in the south. And 4) the progressive disunity of the United States government. Here we had the anti-war movement as a continuing force. But that movement attained dominance pari passu with the weakening of President Nixon. As Watergate metastasized from a "second-rate burglary" into grounds for the removal of a president, U.S. support for success in Vietnam wilted.
The parallels in the current situation are plain, beginning with the nature of the United States? participation. What we have right now is a progressively immobilized executive and a dissenting legislature, leading ? inevitably ? to an impotent military.
The question immediately posed is: Do we feel responsibility for what happens in the period ahead? The Iraqi government resembles the government of South Vietnam in 1973-4 in that Baghdad is fighting, as Saigon fought, for a political system free of overweening foreign elements. But Saigon could not hold out in the long run without U.S. military support, and neither can Baghdad.
If the parallels hold, i.e., if the result of failure in the Middle East is equivalent to the result of failure in Indochina, then we would expect to see the collapse of the Maliki government in Baghdad, some kind of bloody vengeance against Iraqis who had supported that government, and a people subjugated by a regime that sits on one percent the world?s supply of oil and is unlikely to proceed indifferent to the march, by Iraq?s eastern neighbor, to becoming a nuclear power.
In the currency of human deaths, it is unlikely that we would match in Iraq what we stood by for in Vietnam. The statistics aren?t even there, to count accurately the casualties of defeat in that theater. But the most graphic symbol is the picture of Vietnamese, young and old, clinging to a U.S. helicopter in the desperate, final hope to be taken away from those waiting to torture and kill them. As stated, the statistics are not final, but somewhere between a quarter million and two or even three million Vietnamese suffered from our flight from the burden we first had undertaken, and then abandoned.
Dr. Kissinger has said that the use of the American fleet to contain the invasion of 1975 could have saved the day. What could save the day in Iraq? Nothing short of public revulsion channeled toward those Democrats who are measuring these days the political value of honor. In the election ahead, all the world will be looking over our shoulders, including the ghosts of Vietnam.
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