Douglas Turner: Congress needs to take this war off auto-pilot
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s dip into the Afghanistan war is as good an example as any of the careless, slipping down behavior polluting our public life.
With an out-of-control general calling on the president to send 40,000 more soldiers into a hostile land the size of Texas, there has never been a debate on this war in the House or Senate. Afghanistan, and apparently all future wars, is on automatic.
The legal authorization for this exploit is either a joint resolution passed almost unanimously by the House and Senate in the days after the 9/11 attacks, or the infamous Iraq war resolution concocted by President George W. Bush in 2002.
The 2001 resolution authorizes the president, whomever he may be, “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines [that] planned, authorized [or] committed” the terrorist attacks of 2001 and to prevent “future attacks.”
There is a Constitution that right-wingers, except in the instance of bloodshed, like to talk about. It grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war. There have been four congressional and two presidential elections since these two resolutions passed.
The 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress was seen as a repudiation of the fakery of the Bush 2002 Iraq war resolution, and last year thenSen. Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in part because of her support for that legislation.
Yet years later these resolutions, one passed in the heat of anger and the other the product of falsehoods and cowardice, stand as pillars for eternal war, as envisioned by novelist George Orwell in “1984.”
Only a tiny minority here wants to talk about it. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., wants to begin withdrawing the 68,000 troops we already have there. Rep. Jim Mc-Govern, D-Mass., made a floor speech in which he noted the Afghan government headed by Hamid Karzai is corrupt, that he fixed his own re-election, made deals with drug lords and runs an unreliable army and police force.
Only 50 members of the House signed a letter to Obama from McGovern, among them Rep. Dan Maffei, D-Syracuse, asking Obama to resist calls for more troops. No Western New Yorker was on the list of 50.
Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, who voted against the Iraq war, declined to comment on the Afghan affair. The office of Eric Massa, D-Corning, said he voted against a special appropriation for the war, but backed the overall defense spending bill.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N. Y., said she met with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and is watching developments. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N. Y., who backed the Iraq war bill, issued a statement leaving his options open.
Likewise with Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo. His press aide, Theresa Kennedy, said Higgins visited Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and is watching the situation closely. She noted Congress overwhelmingly approved resolutions funding the war.
True. But these catchall military spending bills did not trigger debates about the wisdom of the war whose immediate beneficiaries are Karzai, the drug lords and the poppy growers. Congress has a constitutional duty to take up the issue and cast a recorded vote on the war for the first time in seven years.
Obama is going to take “weeks” to consider the request for 40,000 more bodies from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the ground commander in Afghanistan. Good. This gives Obama time to figure out what to do with the mouthy McChrystal, who resembles the ROTC commander in the film “Animal House,” Douglas Niedermeyer, more every day.
McChrystal recently ordered his troops to get out of their armored vehicles and patrol, exposed to Taliban ground fire. It may cost American lives, but it will make the Afghans like us better, he said. Maybe Obama can find a job for McChrystal patrolling the Hudson River tunnels.
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