[Dialogue] Bush Blames The Troops

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 by TruthDig.com
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bush_blames_the_troops/>  

Bush Blames The Troops

by Robert Scheer

Blame it on the military but make it look like you're supporting the troops.
That's been the convenient gambit of failed emperors throughout history as
they witnessed their empires decline. Not surprisingly then, it's become the
standard rhetorical trick employed by President Bush in shirking
responsibility for the Iraq debacle of his making. Ignoring the fact that we
have a system of civilian control over the military, which is why he, the
elected president, is designated the commander in chief, Bush hides behind
the fiction that the officers in the field are calling the shots when in
fact he has put them in an unwinnable situation and refuses to even consider
a timetable for getting them out.

He did it again Monday, responding to the prospect that both houses of
Congress seem in agreement on setting guidelines for the "progress" that the
president continually proclaims is at hand. "I will strongly reject an
artificial timetable [for] withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying
to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job." This is
disingenuous in the extreme, because Bush is the Washington politician who
plotted this unnecessary war from the moment the 9/11 attack provided him
with an excuse for regime change in a country that had nothing to do with
the terrorist attack.

It was Bush who sent the troops to invade Iraq with the mission of ridding
it of weapons of mass destruction, which he should have known Iraq did not
have, and to end ties with al-Qaida that, the record shows, he knew never
existed. And it was the Bush administration that micro-managed every aspect
of the occupation to disastrous consequences ranging from the
de-Baathification that isolated the Sunnis to premature elections that put
Shiite theocrats in power. The economic reconstruction of Iraq has been a
failure for everyone except the U.S. corporations that have ripped off U.S.
taxpayers to the tune of many billions of dollars. It is only now, when all
of those policies for the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq have
come a cropper, that a military surge has been ordered to provide a social
order for Iraq that this president's policies have destroyed.

This president has been denied nothing by Congress in the way of financial
underwriting for this boondoggle, yet he seeks to cast even the mildest
attempt to hold him accountable for the results as unpatriotic. That is all
that the Democratic congressional leadership has proposed with its
timetable-marks to measure progress on the ground in a war that, as Hawaii
Sen. Daniel Inouye pointed out, has lasted longer than World War II. It is a
very limited, nonbinding attempt to hold the president accountable, for it
does not ban him from using any portion of the whopping $124 billion in new
funds; it requires only that he publicly and specifically defend his claims
of progress.

It's a claim of progress that, until now, has not been met with any
congressional review, even though it is the obligation of Congress to judge
the effectiveness of programs paid for with the funds that Congress alone
can appropriate. If the proposed timetable were in place, then it would be
more difficult for the president to claim success for his surge, as he did
Friday, insisting that "So far, the operation is meeting expectations" and
then confusing his audience by conceding that recently "We have seen some of
the highest casualty levels of the war."

It's gobbledygook, and the Democratic leaders of Congress have finally
decided to call the president on it. "The longer we continue down the
president's path, the further we will be from responsibly ending this war,"
said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Not content any longer to
take Bush at his word, the leaders in both the House and Senate finally
posted some specific benchmarks of progress, accompanied by a nonbinding
suggestion of an end to U.S. troop involvement in this quagmire within a
year's time if genuine progress is not made. Even that minimum restraint on
the president's ambition was accompanied with the caveat that sufficient
troops would remain in Iraq to protect U.S. installations, train the Iraqi
army and fight terrorists.

The proposal was the softest the Democrats could offer without totally
repudiating the will of the voters who brought them to power in the last
election. If the president vetoes this authorization bill, then the onus is
on him for delaying funding for the troops and showing contempt for the
judgment of the voters, who will have another chance in less than two years
to hold the president's party responsible. But that will not restore life to
the 85 U.S. soldiers killed so far in April alone, or prevent even greater
sacrifices to Bush's folly.

Robert Scheer is editor of TruthDig.com <http://www.truthdig.com>  and a
syndicated columnist.

Copyright C 2007 Truthdig

  _____  

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/25/752/

 

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