The Great Iraqi Cop-Out - The Politician's Way of Avoiding Hard Decisions
Sean Scallon
May 17, 2007
U.S. House member Wayne Gilchrist (R-Maryland) had an interesting interview in Reason magazine recently in which he stated that there were at least 30 to 60 members of the House GOP caucus that were opposed to the so-called “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq at the beginning of the year. Alas, a combination of “political pressure from the White House, from our leadership, from constituents who misunderstood the issue” reduced the number of Republican who put their money where their mouths are to just six willing to override President Bush II’s veto of the Iraqi funding supplemental bill.
However, one can reason that the 11 GOP members of Congress that recently met with President Bush II in the White House to relay their concerns about how the war is damaging the Republican Party were probably part of that group of 30 to 60. It would seem strange that just few months later after giving the President exactly what he wanted that such members of Congress would be expressing such political heebie-jeebies about Iraq when they felt exactly the same way before that “political pressure from the White House, from our leadership, from constituents who misunderstood the issue” put a imaginary gun to their heads and forced them to back the President’s Iraq policy.
Many Republican members of Congress have now been openly expressing their concerns about Iraq policy whether it’s through attacking the Iraqi government itself or voicing doubts about the “surge.” But how are these members of Congress dealing with such doubts? They’re going to wait until September to deal with them!
It’s just one of many cop-outs that our elected leaders are making about Iraq policy.
What’s so special about September? Well that’s when the next incarnation of General Grant a.k.a General Petraeus, comes before Congress and gives his report on the situation in Iraq. Many members wish to hear from him before making up their own minds whether to continue to support the war or calling for U.S. troops to withdraw.
Actually, they don’t have to wait five months to hear from Gen. Petraeus because I can tell you exactly what he going to say in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’s going say that while bad things have happened in Iraq, good things are happening too and when you balance everything out, we are making progress and the light is at the end of the tunnel. And those GOP Congressmen are going to shout “Yippee!” and continue their support for the war. After all, if Gen. Petraeus is saying the situation is getting better, who are we to doubt him? We don’t want to micromanage the war now do we, even though we’re the ones who sign the checks for all the bombs?
You really don’t have to be a brilliant person to figure out what Gen. Petraeus is going to say. He’s no fool. He’s knows full well the “surge,” or whatever you want to call it, needs time before it can accurately be gauged as whether it has “succeeded” or “failed” depending on what criteria you use. More time than five months anyway. So he’s going to go Congress and tell them exactly what they want to see and hear: A person in authority on the ground in Iraq, in this case a highly decorated and respected officer, saying that progress is being made and that they should continue with their support of the war effort. What else would he say? “It’s all over but the shouting?” Why do that and jepoardize his budget? By telling GOP members of Congress exactly what they want to hear, it excuses them from making any honest assessments of their own because they’ve given that power over to Gen. Petraeus. And so long as he tells them things are going in the right direction, the decision becomes so much easier, thus the essence of the cop-out.
Wake me up when September ends, as the song goes.
Of course the Democrats in Congress aren’t much of an improvement. They’ve found a way to cop-out too, it’s called “benchmarks.”
Forget the argument that the Dems haven’t been doing enough to try and stop the war. They don’t have the votes to stop it and even if they did manage to find enough Republicans to override a veto, chances are President Bush II would very well leave the troops in Iraq starving and without ammo just to prove a point, one the U.S. public might very well buy into about “stab-in-the-back.” It’s been done before, successfully, and the Dems aren’t going to walk into that trap. So that’s why we have the compromise term of “benchmarks,” little goals that Iraqi government, a supposedly freely elected and sovereign body, is supposed to me to justify the support the U.S. will give to it. It’s the only restrictive thing that can pass muster with the whole Congress and the President.
It’s also another cop-out. Apparently instead of looking at the U.S.’ own policies and failures in Iraq, the politicians have instead turned their gaze at the Iraqi government and have decided they are the ones to blame for the mess WE created. We’ve bombed them. We’ve sanctioned them. We’ve tortured them. We’ve humiliated them. We’ve killed them and we’ve wrecked their country on top of all that and it’s all their fault I guess, i.e. the Iraqi people and the government they elected. It’s so easy to do because they live far away and are not Americans, so they have to be incompetent!
This cop-out is the utter height of hypocrisy. Colin Powell himself said “you break it, you own it” but apparently we’re blaming the Pottery Barn owners for our own clumsiness and stupidity. They were supposed to overcome all our mistakes. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s their fault for not being what we thought they were, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
To place arbitrary guidelines and demands as what the Iraqi government is supposed to do to clean up the mess we’ve made is hardly going to inspire confidence of the Iraqi people in their government, especially one that looks like a bad puppet that won’t move when the strings are pulled. Like the Vietnam debacle, the loss of confidence in the South Vietnamese government by the U.S. by the mid-1960s only escalated the war because the U.S. became convinced Saigon could not handle the Viet Cong insurgency and the North Vietnamese support it was getting by itself. It HAD to rely on U.S. support because the U.S. insisted that it rely on that support which only made it weaker in the eyes of its people. Who wants to back a government that your biggest ally and protector doesn’t feel is up to the job?
The only thing such cop-outs do is prolong the war beyond the point when it should have ended a long time ago. No one want to take the first step in realizing that a change in policy is needed, that it’s time to begin the process of withdrawl because they are too scared to make it. “You go first” each side says to the other. But since neither the Republicans or the Democrats have such brave and wise men at their disposals, the mediocre and the just plain awful are left to make policy. And what do such people always do when faced with tough choices like what faces the U.S. in Iraq?
They cop-out. What a surprise.
Sean Scallon is an author and freelance journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.
However, one can reason that the 11 GOP members of Congress that recently met with President Bush II in the White House to relay their concerns about how the war is damaging the Republican Party were probably part of that group of 30 to 60. It would seem strange that just few months later after giving the President exactly what he wanted that such members of Congress would be expressing such political heebie-jeebies about Iraq when they felt exactly the same way before that “political pressure from the White House, from our leadership, from constituents who misunderstood the issue” put a imaginary gun to their heads and forced them to back the President’s Iraq policy.
Many Republican members of Congress have now been openly expressing their concerns about Iraq policy whether it’s through attacking the Iraqi government itself or voicing doubts about the “surge.” But how are these members of Congress dealing with such doubts? They’re going to wait until September to deal with them!
It’s just one of many cop-outs that our elected leaders are making about Iraq policy.
What’s so special about September? Well that’s when the next incarnation of General Grant a.k.a General Petraeus, comes before Congress and gives his report on the situation in Iraq. Many members wish to hear from him before making up their own minds whether to continue to support the war or calling for U.S. troops to withdraw.
Actually, they don’t have to wait five months to hear from Gen. Petraeus because I can tell you exactly what he going to say in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’s going say that while bad things have happened in Iraq, good things are happening too and when you balance everything out, we are making progress and the light is at the end of the tunnel. And those GOP Congressmen are going to shout “Yippee!” and continue their support for the war. After all, if Gen. Petraeus is saying the situation is getting better, who are we to doubt him? We don’t want to micromanage the war now do we, even though we’re the ones who sign the checks for all the bombs?
You really don’t have to be a brilliant person to figure out what Gen. Petraeus is going to say. He’s no fool. He’s knows full well the “surge,” or whatever you want to call it, needs time before it can accurately be gauged as whether it has “succeeded” or “failed” depending on what criteria you use. More time than five months anyway. So he’s going to go Congress and tell them exactly what they want to see and hear: A person in authority on the ground in Iraq, in this case a highly decorated and respected officer, saying that progress is being made and that they should continue with their support of the war effort. What else would he say? “It’s all over but the shouting?” Why do that and jepoardize his budget? By telling GOP members of Congress exactly what they want to hear, it excuses them from making any honest assessments of their own because they’ve given that power over to Gen. Petraeus. And so long as he tells them things are going in the right direction, the decision becomes so much easier, thus the essence of the cop-out.
Wake me up when September ends, as the song goes.
Of course the Democrats in Congress aren’t much of an improvement. They’ve found a way to cop-out too, it’s called “benchmarks.”
Forget the argument that the Dems haven’t been doing enough to try and stop the war. They don’t have the votes to stop it and even if they did manage to find enough Republicans to override a veto, chances are President Bush II would very well leave the troops in Iraq starving and without ammo just to prove a point, one the U.S. public might very well buy into about “stab-in-the-back.” It’s been done before, successfully, and the Dems aren’t going to walk into that trap. So that’s why we have the compromise term of “benchmarks,” little goals that Iraqi government, a supposedly freely elected and sovereign body, is supposed to me to justify the support the U.S. will give to it. It’s the only restrictive thing that can pass muster with the whole Congress and the President.
It’s also another cop-out. Apparently instead of looking at the U.S.’ own policies and failures in Iraq, the politicians have instead turned their gaze at the Iraqi government and have decided they are the ones to blame for the mess WE created. We’ve bombed them. We’ve sanctioned them. We’ve tortured them. We’ve humiliated them. We’ve killed them and we’ve wrecked their country on top of all that and it’s all their fault I guess, i.e. the Iraqi people and the government they elected. It’s so easy to do because they live far away and are not Americans, so they have to be incompetent!
This cop-out is the utter height of hypocrisy. Colin Powell himself said “you break it, you own it” but apparently we’re blaming the Pottery Barn owners for our own clumsiness and stupidity. They were supposed to overcome all our mistakes. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s their fault for not being what we thought they were, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
To place arbitrary guidelines and demands as what the Iraqi government is supposed to do to clean up the mess we’ve made is hardly going to inspire confidence of the Iraqi people in their government, especially one that looks like a bad puppet that won’t move when the strings are pulled. Like the Vietnam debacle, the loss of confidence in the South Vietnamese government by the U.S. by the mid-1960s only escalated the war because the U.S. became convinced Saigon could not handle the Viet Cong insurgency and the North Vietnamese support it was getting by itself. It HAD to rely on U.S. support because the U.S. insisted that it rely on that support which only made it weaker in the eyes of its people. Who wants to back a government that your biggest ally and protector doesn’t feel is up to the job?
The only thing such cop-outs do is prolong the war beyond the point when it should have ended a long time ago. No one want to take the first step in realizing that a change in policy is needed, that it’s time to begin the process of withdrawl because they are too scared to make it. “You go first” each side says to the other. But since neither the Republicans or the Democrats have such brave and wise men at their disposals, the mediocre and the just plain awful are left to make policy. And what do such people always do when faced with tough choices like what faces the U.S. in Iraq?
They cop-out. What a surprise.
Sean Scallon is an author and freelance journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.
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