What's another 50 billion for Iraq?

The Democrats seem to be absolutely toothless with respect to reigning in Bush. He can simply thumb his nose at the Democrats and at the American people. At the same time war supporters have sponsored ghastly ads. They claim that the opposition would have the US withdraw from Iraq for political reasons. As if the US is not in Iraq and staying there for political reasons. It is the pro-war ads that are taking advantage of people's ideals and concern for soldiers to promote political aims just as much as any anti-war moves to force withdrawal are political.
There is the same cynical appeal to people's emotions in Canada when it comes to the Afghan war but nothing so gross and pukish as the US ads.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush is preparing to ask Congress for as much as $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a White House official.



The request signals increasing White House confidence that it can fend off mounting congressional pressure to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, the Post reported.

The additional funds would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Post said.

The request is expected to be announced next month after the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker report to Congress on the state of the war, the newspaper said.

Asked about the Post report, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said no decision had yet been made about funding requests.

"We have said previously that after Gen. Petraeus reports we will be evaluating what adjustments may need to be made to our pending FY 08 (fiscal 2008) supplemental request," Stanzel said.

"I would decline to speculate on this, as Gen. Petraeus has not testified nor has any decision been made at this stage about whether, when or what specific changes would be made."

A Conservative Voice: Democratic Jellyfish, Republican Lemmings

Obviously opposition to the Iraq war is not a monopoly of left wingers. This fellow is about as anti=left as you can be. He is also not opposed to "fighting terrorism" as he thinks that it would be appropriate to bomb Iran back into the stone age if they support terrorism. His opinion of middle easterners is not exactly liberal!
A link to Turtel's own site can be found at the Conservative Voice.
by Joel Turtel
Democrat Jellyfish, Republican Lemmings
May 27, 2007 01:00 PM EST



I never in my life thought I would be rooting for Democrats to get some spine. I despise the liberals’ and Democrats’ fascist-socialist steal-your-money and regulate us to death philosophy. But they are now the only power we have who can stop this sick, meaningless war in Iraq. Yet the Democrats are jellyfish.

What dopes we were to start this war. We played right into the hands of the terrorists. We are fighting on their ground, in their territory, in their kind of guerrilla war, in a tribal, religiously fanatic region of the world. We have now spent over $500 billion on this war, draining the life-blood and hard-earned taxes of average Americans, with no end in sight.

Thousands of young Americans have already died to give “democracy” to fanatic Islamic millions whose mullahs and religion preach hatred against the very concept of democracy. They practice a religion that detests democracy and individual liberty, a religion that demands absolute obedience to their god and Islamic law.

The only way this war will end is if Democrats get the spine to cut off the war funds, now. I have given up hope on the Republicans. Like lemmings, they just follow the President over the cliff, taking the American people with them.

President Bush is playing a huge bluff game with the Democrats. He dares them to cut off the funds, and thereby “endanger our troops,” and the Democrats have once again caved in to the bluff. They have just passed the President’s newest request for another $95 billion for the war.

Democrats in Congress, here’s what would happen if you cut off the spigot. Without money for the war, the President would have to withdraw the troops. He would never endanger our soldiers in the field. He would withdraw the troops, then rant at Congress for making him do this. But Democrats, if you don’t call his bluff, he will never end this war. He is on a messianic mission to “spread democracy” to a democracy-hating Middle-East, and is in complete denial about the futility of such a mission.

Democrats, our Founding Fathers gave you the ultimate weapon to stop a President who endangers our country with useless wars. That weapon was the power of the purse. If you don’t use it, you and the Congress you control are just utterly useless to the American people and to our security.

The Democrats will say, “we have tried to stop the war, but we don’t have the two-thirds majority to overturn the President’s veto. That’s why we had to pass the new bill giving President Bush another $95 billion for the war.”

No, Democrats, you did not have to capitulate. You did not up the ante in this power poker game. Your strategy should be to refuse to pass ANY spending bill until the President stops this war. If necessary, bring the government to a halt. Cut off all funding to every department, every bureaucrat, every recipient of a government check. Hell, even stop the President’s salary and the salary of his cabinet members.

Oh, how government-union employees will howl when they don’t get their weekly paychecks. Oh, how Social Security recipients will howl when they don’t get their Social Security checks. Post office employees might even go on strike. Take away the billions of dollars that millions of Americans get from government paychecks and you will see how fast this war stops. Millions of Americans will demand President Bush’s resignation or impeachment if he doesn’t stop the war immediately (Social Security recipients—don’t worry. With your help, the war should end in about a week, and you’ll then get your checks).

But do you Democrats have the spine to do this? Do you have the nerve to take away government paychecks from millions of government-union employees that voted you into office? What do you value most, your own power in office, or stopping this war? Care to up the ante?

We constantly hear from the President and his fellow Republicans that there would be horrendous consequences if we withdrew from Iraq. OK. What consequences? If we left Iraq tomorrow, here’s my guess on what would happen. There would be a blood-bath civil war between the Shiites, Sunnis, former Saddam’s Bathe party militia, Al Qaida terrorists, Iranian infiltrators, and a dozen other fanatical groups, all at each others’ throats. It would be like another Palestine, where Fatah and Hamas terrorist groups are now at each other’s throat for power.

Does it really matter who wins this civil war? Most of the groups there are either secular or religious fanatics, and the group that wins will probably create a dictatorship as bad as Saddam Hussein’s. When we hung Saddam, we just ousted one sick dictator, only to make room for another. In the Middle East, from past experience, what more can you expect?

Then what happens when this new secular or Islamic dictator is in power? He will not disrupt our oil supply (which is all we really care about), because oil is the only thing that keeps these Middle-East countries from descending back into the Middle Ages. It is their only resource. Did Saddam cut off our oil? Does Iran stop selling us oil, even though they hate our guts? Do they want to lose their billions of dollars in revenue? I don’t think so.

Moreover, it might be the best thing that happened to us if Middle-East countries cut off our oil. What we need is a massive, alternative-energy “Manhattan project” like the Manhattan Project in World War II that created the atomic bomb in record time. We already have the technology to become oil-independent.

We also have huge, untapped supplies of our own oil, gas, and coal if we stop strangling our energy companies with “save-the-earth” environmental regulations that stop us from drilling all over the Arctic, Alaska, and offshore. If we combine an alternative-energy “Manhattan project” and take the strangling shackles off our oil and gas companies, we soon won’t need Middle-East oil anymore. When that happens, these countries will go bankrupt, their economies will shrivel up, and they’ll have no more money to fund the terrorists.

What about the poor people of Iraq? I feel truly sorry for them. But if they can’t get their act together to defend their own liberty, should we waste the lives of thousands of Americans and bankrupt ourselves in a never-ending war to “spread democracy?” Should we strangle Americans’ freedom, turn America into a police state with “Patriot” acts and massive surveillance of Americans by our own FBI, to protect the “freedom” of Iraqi muslims?

If we left Iraq now, we could use part of the hundreds of billions of dollars we save to hunt down Al Qaeda terrorists all over the world. They were the original and still worst threat to our security. We could also build a high wall between us and Mexico to keep out Middle-East terrorists, and pay for surveillance equipment at airports and all our harbors to check every package and container coming in.

We could also threaten Iranian leaders that we will decimate their power like we did to the Taliban in Afghanistan if they continue to support terrorists who try to attack America. We don’t need nuclear weapons. We can level their power centers and infrastructure with massive bombings like we did against Nazi Germany. To win, we can’t get sucked into a guerrilla war on their territory, far from our supply lines. Instead, we could bomb them into the Stone age so they could no longer support terrorists. I just hope the good Iranian people overthrow their current rulers before we have to destroy their country one day.

But none of this will happen with our Democrat jellyfish. This war will go on and on, sucking the lifeblood from America like the barbarians sucked the lifeblood from ancient Rome. Instead of hoarding our strength to fight the real enemy, the Al Qaeda terrorists, we now squander our strength in a useless civil war in Iraq. God forbid, will we have to elect a Democrat President to end this war?

Why Congress Caved to Bush.

If there is even greater civil strife in Iraq when the US and allies leave I doubt that the US public will care that much as long as there are no US casualties and the govt. is not spending billions of taxpayers dollars there. I don't see why the Democrats are worried about the effects of a withdrawal. They should be more worried about the effects of staying. However as the article notes the US public has no choice other than the Democrats and Republicans. In fact there is no choice at all as far as electing a party that will end the war.

Why Congress Caved to Bush

by Patrick J. Buchanan
The antiwar Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.

For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.

Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.

Yet, today, there are more U.S. troops in Iraq than when the Democrats won. More are on the way. And with the surge and retention of troops in Iraq beyond normal tours, there should be a record number of U.S. troops in country by year's end.

Why did the Democrats capitulate?

Because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they fear the consequences if they put their antiwar beliefs into practice. Because they are afraid if they defund the war and force President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops, the calamity he predicts will come to pass and they will be held accountable for losing Iraq and the strategic disaster that might well ensue.

Democrats are an intimidated party. The reasons are historical. They were shredded by Nixon and Joe McCarthy for FDR's surrenders to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, for losing China to Mao's hordes, for the "no-win war" in Korea, for being "soft on communism."

The best and the brightest – JFK's New Frontiersmen – were held responsible for plunging us into Vietnam and proving incapable of winning the war. A Democratic Congress cut off aid to Saigon in 1975, ceding Southeast Asia to Hanoi and bringing on the genocide of Pol Pot.

Democrats know they are distrusted on national security. They fear that if they defund this war and bring on a Saigon ending in the Green Zone, it will be a generation before they are trusted with national power. And power is what the party is all about.

Yet, not only does the situation in Iraq appear increasingly grim, with rising U.S. and Iraqi casualties, other shoes are about to drop that will reverberate throughout the region.

Support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his war in Lebanon a debacle and his leadership denounced by a commission he appointed, is in single digits. Waiting in the wings is Likud super-hawk "Bibi" Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, who compares today to Munich 1938 and equates Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

If and when Bibi comes to power, he will use every stratagem to provoke us into attacking "Hitler."

Also drumming for war on Iran are the floundering neocons and the Israeli lobby. Under orders from the lobby, Nancy Pelosi stripped from a House bill a stipulation that Bush must come to Congress for authorization before launching an attack on Iran.

With Democratic contenders reciting the mantra, "All options are on the table," and Iran defying U.N. sanctions, pursuing nuclear enrichment and detaining U.S. citizens, Bush has a blank check to launch a third war.

Lebanon is ablaze. Gaza is ablaze. The Afghan war is not going well. The Taliban have a privileged sanctuary. The NATO allies grow weary.

In Pakistan, the most dangerous country on earth – one bullet away from an Islamic republic with atom bombs – our erstwhile ally, President Musharraf, is caught in a political crisis over his ouster of the chief justice.

Presidents Musharraf in Islamabad, Karzai in Kabul and Siniora in Beirut, and Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, sit on shaky thrones. No one knows what follows their fall. But it is hard to see how it would not be crippling for America's position.

With such volatility in this crucial region of the world, with such uncertainty, it is easy to see why Democrats prefer to be the "dummy" at the bridge table and let Bush play the hand.

The congressional Democrats are cynical, but they are not stupid. If the surge works and U.S. troops are being withdrawn by fall 2008, they do not want it said of them that they "cut and ran" when the going got tough, that they played Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill.

And if the war is going badly in 2008, they know that the American people, in repudiating the party of Bush and Cheney, have no other choice than the party of Hillary and Pelosi and Harry Reid.

That is why congressional Democrats are surely saying privately of the angry antiwar left what has often been said by the Beltway Republican elite of the right: "Don't worry about them. They have nowhere else to go."

And that is why the antiwar left was thrown under the bus.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC

Why are the Pacifists so Passive?

This right wing article nevertheless gives a quite reasonable explanation of why Democrats may be splashing about in the water but refusing to set a course for withdrawal from Iraq or challenging the surge -to mix metaphors. This is a New York Times opinion piece. The article also puts the lie to the claim of some Democrats that they cannot control Bush even if they wanted to.

Why Are the Pacifists So Passive?


By LYNN CHU and JOHN YOO
Published: February 12, 2007
BEFORE the November elections, many Democratic candidates and legal academics insisted that the Iraq war was illegal and that only Congress, not the president, had the power to manage it under the Constitution. Interestingly, now that Democrats control Capitol Hill, they are fretting that if Congress tried to cut back on funds or troop levels, it might be, well, unconstitutional. Democrats are suddenly acknowledging that the commander in chief and executive branch may be better off without their micromanagement, after all.

Of course, they haven’t been silent about the war: both the House and Senate last week were political circuses, juggling various bills that proposed to “rein in” the president. But behind all the bluster, the one thing all the major Democratic proposals have in common is that they are purely symbolic resolutions, with all the force of a postcard. (Two other Democratic Senate proposals that have actual teeth — one by Russell Feingold to cut off money for the war, another by Barack Obama to mandate troop reductions — were ignored by the leadership.)

The fact is, Congress has every power to end the war — if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse. Its British forebears in Parliament micromanaged the monarchy quite a bit, for instance by making money (the “sinews of war”) contingent on attacking one country and making peace with another. And there is more direct precedent: In 1973, Congress affirmatively acted to cut off funds for Vietnam. It also cut off money for the Nicaraguan contras with the Boland Amendment in 1982.

Not only could Congress cut off money, it could require scheduled troop withdrawals, shrink or eliminate units, or freeze weapons supplies. It could even repeal or amend the authorization to use force it passed in 2002.

A pullout, however, would have no chance of success, because its supporters are likely to lack the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto. But to stop President Bush’s proposed troop surge, Congress doesn’t have to do anything. It can just sit back and fail to enact the periodic supplemental spending measures required to keep the war going. Congress has wielded considerable power by just threatening such measures, as with President James K. Polk in the Mexican-American War and President Ronald Reagan in Lebanon after the 1983 barracks bombing.

The Constitution doesn’t pick winners. It leaves it to the three branches to use their unique powers to struggle for supremacy. James Madison, the leading intellectual force behind the Constitution, rebutted Patrick Henry’s firebrand attack on executive war powers during the Virginia ratifying convention by reminding him that Congress could control any renegade president by stopping the flow of money.

But with power comes responsibility. The truth is that this Congress is not sure what to do in Iraq. Its hesitation reflects America’s uncertainty and divisions. Antiwar bluster is high at the moment, echoing popular frustration and grim news from Baghdad.

Our elected representatives know, however, that policy can’t be made by poll. Most also understand that that leaving Iraq to a sectarian power struggle would break our word and lead to slaughter. A failed state in Iraq would breed more terrorism, not less, by becoming a haven for more radical training camps.

Most in Congress, in fact, are not eager to replay Vietnam. The United States has had far fewer casualties in this conflict. Our national security interests here are high. If we falter now, it would be read as a “defeat” and embolden more terrorist attacks on us. Once again the world would begin to doubt American strength. This would undermine our ability to conduct credible diplomacy, while electrifying Islamists to further jihad.

The truth is that the Democrats in Congress would rather sit back and let the president take the heat in war than do anything risky. That way they get to prepare for the next election while pointing fingers of blame and spinning conspiracy theories. It is odd to see the Democratic Party turning toward isolationism, bonding with paleoconservatives, and so bitterly averse to the ideals of democratic nation building.

War is not about instant gratification in a hail of klieg lights, our truncated Gulf war notwithstanding. In an interdependent, globalized world, we can’t shrug our shoulders and shirk in the war on terrorism. America made a fundamental change in foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks: to support and spread democracy. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, should understand this well. She made her national reputation as a junior representative in the 1980s criticizing the Chinese dictatorship after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the public would soon tire of war and engage in overheated accusations of bad faith. It is quite right that Congress review, and consider, from its unique perspective, what changes, if any, it now wants to make. If Congress really believes the Bush administration has set us on the wrong course, it can act tomorrow to cut the sinews of war in Iraq. But its failure to do so seems an acknowledgment that the consequences would be far worse than what we face now.

Lynn Chu is a lawyer in New York. John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.