Month: September 2007

Congress Quietly Approves Billions More for Iraq War

John Nichols of The Nation reports that on Thursday the Senate voted 94–1 to raise the federal debt limit by $850 billion (now up to $9.815 trillion) and to grant the White House at least $9 billion in new war funding and more. (See Nichols’s article in full below.) Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold was the only senator to vote against the measure. Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, McCain, and Brownback—all presidential candidates who, says Nichols, “are more involved in campaigning than governing”—did not vote. Feingold said:

Endless war, unpopular war—something’s got to give

Never mind the small token troop reductions the president mentioned Thursday night. The Bush administration has no intention of ever withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq-indeed, Cheney and other neocons want to deepen the blood-quagmire by striking Iran (see below)-but something has got to give. The war is costing $10 to $12 billion per month when the nation is already perilously in debt because of massive high-end tax cuts. But we refuse to be told, “No, you can’t have sturdy infrastructure because the money’s tight-we’re at war.” If that were an honest argument, the White House or Congress would move to reverse some of the Bush tax cuts, share the sacrifice. But no.

Obama Warns Bush, “You Don’t Have Our Authorization” for Iran War

Here is heartening news: The first of the major Democratic presidential candidates tells the White House not to start a war against Iran. Now, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, what say you?

(Reid, Pelosi-care to add your voices? John Warner? Retired generals?)

The Huffington Post presents exclusive excerpts of a major policy speech to be delivered in Iowa today (9/12) by Senator Barack Obama in which the Illinois senator will declare: “George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear-loud and clear-from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”

41 Senators Could End the War

“Congress does not have to pass legislation to bring an end to the war in Iraq—it simply has to block passage of any bill that would continue to fund the war. This requires not 67 or 60 Senate votes, or even 51, but just 41—the number of senators needed to maintain a filibuster and prevent a bill from coming up for a vote. In other words, the Democrats have more than enough votes to end the Iraq War—if they choose to do so.”Media Misrepresent Dems’ Options on Iraq War” FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) 9/13/07

Democrats, Work with Generals to End the War Focus the Debate on Readiness, Broader National Security Issues

War critics, peace activists, read E. J. Dionne’s column “Democrats’ Last, Best Hope” in the Sept. 11 Washington Post. Dionne says that in his opening remarks before the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on Sept.10, Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked whether “Iraq is the war worth the risk of breaking our army and being unable to deal with other risks to our nation.” Skelton said war critics should transcend the narrow question about whether the surge has succeeded or failed, and keep the focus on a broader debate about “the overall security of this nation. . . . [W]ith so many troops in Iraq, I think our response to an unexpected threat would come at a devastating cost.”

Ready to Strike Iran?

The Times of London reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a massive three-day strike against 1,200 targets in Iran to “take out” its military capabilities.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”

Worlds Apart

We do not know quite how to express the quality of gratitude and belongingness we feel when we hear the President of the United States, once again, on his 16th? visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, refer to our stricken area as “this [or that] part of the world,” as he has done in post-Katrina visits going back at least to early 2006. It would be one thing if he were talking about the tsunami in Indonesia . . . Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief and David Kurtz at TPM Café have both noted this seemingly habitual phrasing, which can only be felt as off-putting. And it can only be interpreted as the speaker’s distancing of himself from responsibility for the area described. (In its patent intent to annoy, the locution is similar to Republicans’ machine-like repetition of “the Democrat party” instead of “the Democratic party.”) For a president who claims to be a Texan through and through, this construction of speech doesn’t sound very neighborly.

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