The Washington Post reports today that the House passed another appropriation for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, this time for $37 billion.
The House on Tuesday approved spending an additional $37 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, overcoming the opposition of some Democrats who have concluded that the Afghan conflict is unwinnable.
We've noted Peter's war votes before, but I think it's important to note that, once again, Peter Welch has voted against continuing the funding for the wars.
You can see the roll-call vote results here: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll474.xml
To Representative Welch: thanks for keeping the faith with your Vermont voters!
It appears there is no "surge" from the perspective of the people who live in the prison camp that used to be called Baghdad. A Guardian reporter has posted YouTube video from Baghdad. As an Iraqi citizen, he has managed to get into places no other journalist can.
House Democratic leaders could complete work as soon as Monday on a half-trillion-dollar spending package that will include billions of dollars for the war effort in Iraq without the timelines for the withdrawal of combat forces that President Bush has refused to accept, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said yesterday.
In a complicated deal over the war funds, Democrats will include about $11 billion more in domestic spending than Bush has requested, emergency drought relief for the Southeast and legislation to address the subprime mortgage crisis, Hoyer told a meeting of the Washington Post editorial board.
If the bargain were to become law, it would be the third time since Democrats took control of Congress that they would have failed to force Bush to change course in Iraq and continued to fund a war that they have repeatedly vowed to end. But it would also be the clearest instance yet of the president bowing to a Democratic demand for more money for domestic priorities, an increase that he had promised to reject.
Well, then. Today, I was witness to a truly inspiring day of direct action. With results, as you can see from the sign that was on the recruiter's office in Williston, today. All of you old coots who grumble about the youth of today, it's time to listen up. More below the jump...
Voters and the media continue to ask the presidential candidates to state whether troops will remain in Iraq should they be elected.The candidates are also being queried about the troop level that might remain as part of other military and foreign policy objectives.
Some answers are better than others.However, in addition to the answers so far, the question: "will there be troops in Iraq [1, 2, 4 etc.] years into your presidency?" also misses the mark.
What the candidates have not yet said, below . . .
Despite better education and more awareness within the general population, a pervasive bias remains against people with mental health problems.
Suffering from mental illness too often means suffering from prejudice or discrimination as well. The systemic biases in our communities and institutions exacerbate the very illness afflicting those who most need support and understanding. Prejudice and lack of access to care are another set of roadblocks for people struggling with acute and/or chronic serious mental health problems.
It is an all-consuming task, for many who have mental problems, to cope with their disabilities and work toward maintaining or preserving - to the full extent they can - a functional life. This burden frequently falls on the family and loved ones who help to care and take responsibility for those with mental/behavioral health and personality disorders.Now, throw in the added burden of prejudice, neglect, a judgmental community that fails at its duty to be a support system (or to allow a support system to be in place), and life for the mentally ill is one nasty uphill fight.
If you haven't guessed already, this is about the U.S. war on Iraq . . .(more below)
Congressman Peter Welch met today with a group of some 100-120 Vermonters to discuss the war in the Aldrich Library in Barre today. Hoo boy, where to begin... Let's just say that it was the most heated confrontation that I've ever personally witnessed between constituents and a politician. Much more below the jump, it's a long one...
A couple of issues near and dear to the hearts of Vermont activists are playing out (or beginning to).
First is the aftermath of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's move to do what so many Vermonters wanted Rep. Peter Welch to do - sort of. As everyone has no doubt heard by now, Kucinich called the impeachment question on the floor of the House (where motions on impeachment are considered privileged and must be addressed). Yay Dennis, except, well - it was a call for the impeachment of Cheney, which seems to me to miss the target politically and ethically. Long past are the bygone days where people on the left wondered whether President Bush was no more than an ineffectual empty suit. Cheney may be his most crude, effective and brazen hatchet man, but he is still a hatchet man - a mere symptom of the problem that is Bush himself.
In any event, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland moved quickly to table the motion, but was stymied by a block of Democrats joined (ultimately, after some vote-switching) by Republicans who thought a public debate over the merits of ditching a vice president whose approval rating is nearly in the single digits would somehow embarass his critics more than his defenders (this is bizarro world, isn't it?). The motion was not tabled, but, after getting the dissident Dems marching to his drum, was then quickly sent by Hoyer to the Judiciary committee where the profoundly disappointing Chair, Rep. John Conyers, will simply stack it to die along with the other Kucinich impeachment resolution gathering cobwebs in that committee.
But the question on everyone's mind is - will Kucinich simply bring it to the floor again (and aim at Bush next time)? By House rules, it remains a privileged motion that must be considered. If Kucinich is serious, he could well bring it to the floor on primetime every day of the session. He's gotten gobs of good feedback on this, so activists are watching and waiting...
Second is Rep. Welch's moment of truth on Iraq funding that is now on on its way.
Am I being harsh? Perhaps. Maybe it's just the first expression that came to mind.
If you're a Vermonter, you probably already know about Sen. Leahy caving in to the right-wing noise machine's phony righteous indignation and voting to condemn MoveOn.org's NYT ad that (perish the thought!) General Westmoreland Petraeus might not actually be so on the level in regards to Iraq.
Well, as you now know, the Continuing Resolution that would extend fiscal year 2007 spending at the same levels for 7 weeks into fiscal year 2008 has just passed. And yes, there is Iraq money in there. The MoveOn condemnation was an amendment to that bill. So they stuck it on a must-pass bill, and sadly, Welch and many others didn't attempt to kill the amendment as far as I know. Not good. Welch voted for the bill.
The following comes courtesy of the Welch press office...
Leahy said, “It seems clear that the President has no idea how to end this war and has every intention of laying it on the doorstep of the next President. He would leave as many troops stuck on this treadmill next summer as we had there a year ago. The surge that was supposed to usher in a political solution among Iraq’s warring factions has failed, with a settlement no closer today than it was one, two or three years ago. Meanwhile we have become an excuse for Iraq to avoid reaching a settlement. We have been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II. It’s time to begin bringing our brave troops home from the middle of Iraq’s civil war.”
Sanders said, “President Bush misled us into this war 4 1/2 years ago, and he is still misleading us. Bush’s ‘troop withdrawal’ program will leave us with as many troops in Iraq as we had before the ‘surge’ troop buildup -- about 130,000. Even more importantly, this president has no idea as to how to end this war. Bush’s advisors concede that this war, already longer than World War II, could go on for another five to 10 years. This is unacceptable. We need to bring our troops home and develop a new and more effective strategy for fighting the very serious problem of international terrorism.”
Welch said, “The President made clear tonight that there is no end in sight to the war in Iraq. He continues to blindly pursue a failed military strategy for a civil war that demands a political and economic solution. The American military has achieved every objective this President has given them. They are now stretched beyond their capacity, leaving America exposed to threats elsewhere around the world. Continuing to referee a civil war with no end in sight is unacceptable to our military, unacceptable to the American taxpayer, and unacceptable for America’s national security. President Bush has no strategy in Iraq other than running out the clock on his presidency, knowing that this war will soon be another President’s burden. It is imperative that Congress finally use the power of the purse to end this war and bring our troops home.”
Here's a doozy. Bush-supported Iraqi Prime Minister (such as the position is) Al-Maliki is bristling at criticism that he's inneffective and irrelevant - particularly the recent calls (from people like Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin and a bunch of Republicans) that he step down.
"There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages"
Okay, so far so good...
"for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin,"
Hm. Leaving out someone a little more obvious, aren't we?
But here's the payoff quote. Why should the criticism of Maliki stop? Because...
"This is severe interference in our domestic affairs."
Update, 10:46 PM... I am reminded by Steve Benen of many things, perhaps most significant is that the reality of the Turk-Kurd dynamic is just too much to blithely gloss over. I try to slide over it below (while acknowledging it) to make this whole piece more thematically tight, but that's just ridiculous. Any new borders would have to include a Kurdish state. And any Kurdish state would incur the wrath of the Turks - but that's still a scenario more managable than a Turkey-absorbed Kurdistan, so try this map instead. Eh, I'll stick with state, local and national politics...
(Please note: I am not promoting this as the solution, merely...making conversation... those who read this site know that I am not a foreign policy guy.)
The trisection of Iraq into three states - one each dominated by Kurds, Shia and Sunnis - is a notion that never quite goes away, but is never quite seriously addressed either. Even it's high-profile proponents such as Senator Joe Biden hardly seem to mention it anymore. Iraq, which was carved into a state arbitrarily in the post-colonial era, never truly gained the sort of national identity that the secular baathists were trying to create, and it can certainly be argued that now is a less than ideal time to somehow make it work - especially since it's now being suggested that hardwiring these underlying divisions into the nascent, dysfunctional parliament may have only served to exacerbate the friction.
But it always does raise one question for me. If the geographic carving knife is on the rhetorical table, instead of making one problematic state building project into three, is it worth considering going the other direction? For example:
Problem:
Solution?
Again, I'm not proposing it, but it's an interesting point of conversation (including some very big associated problems)...
David Corn in the Washington Post rebutts neo-con hack Bill Kristol's seemingly delusional assertion that history will remember George W. Bush's presidency as a roaring success (and that, my friends, was a hard sentence to type without laughing or crying).
The whole piece is a must read, but one particular sentence just made me think for a moment:
Still, Kristol advises, stick with the "surge," train more Iraqi troops, and all will be well. The United States has already spent $19 billion training 346,500 or so Iraqi troops and police officers, and now merely six battalions -- down from 10, according to Gen. Peter Pace -- can function independently. That is, only 3,000 Iraqi troops are operating on their own after all this time and money.
Now if you do the math it means that the going rate for each successful Iraqi military or police officer to "stand up so we can stand down" is a breathtaking 6.3 million dollars (in the Bush ledger, that's one post-Katrina superdome repair).
We don't often quote conservatives like Andrew Sullivan around here, but he has a very interesting discussion in his blog last week, and I think it's interesting precisely because he's a conservative.
If you're like me, you don't have any trouble with the fact that Libby and Cheney arranged to do whatever they had to do to destroy Valerie Wilson and her husband, and you really don't have any trouble believing that the stories they used to mislead the United States into invading Iraq were just lies.
Sullivan doesn't want to believe it, especially the part about lying, so he spends more time that we might trying to psychoanalyze Cheney and Libby's motives. What he comes up with is really pretty clear:
Eyes Wide Open, the American Friends Service Committee's widely-acclaimed exhibition on the human cost of the Iraq War, features a pair of boots honoring each U.S. military casualty, a field of shoes and a Wall of Remembrance to memorialize the Iraqis killed in the conflict, and a multimedia display exploring the history, cost and consequences of the war.
By now, in our fifth year of Iraq war fatigue, no single term has been bandied about and abused as "Support the Troops". Part of it has its origins in guilt about the way returning Vietnam Vets were treated by certain people. And naturally, no matter how much one may or may not support what the troops are actually doing, I hope it's still safe to say that we support them as human beings in a difficult situation. And many of us reading this blog know that the best way to 'support the troops' is to remove them from harm's way and bring them home as soon as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, as you all know, often views the troops as nothing more than props and political pawns. They talk about 'supporting the troops' every chance they get, yet their policies do anything but, whether it be the Bush-McCain-Lieberman escalation, the atrocities at Walter Reed Hospital, cuts in Veteran's services, insufficient body armor, you name it. I'm sure you're well aware of them. Yes, it's criminal.
So, today I was a bit stunned (but not surprised) to read in the Times Argus that the VT GOP is proposing a resolution that will declare "full support to our troops and their mission in conducting the War on Terror." The TA reports that "The bill seeks to designate May 6 as "Vermont Vets for Victory Day" and coincides with a six-day support-the-troops rally beginning on May 1 through several communities, including Rutland, Chester and Bennington." It's not as simple as it sounds...
