Bush
Vilifies Democrats, Vows
Veto Of Iraq War Funding Bill
By Bill Van Auken
31 March, 2007
World
Socialist Web
In
a bellicose speech delivered Wednesday, on the eve of a Senate vote
approving a $122 billion spending bill directed primarily at funding
the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush vowed
to veto any legislation proposing troop withdrawals.
Insisting that the war in
Iraq is being fought to prevent new terrorist attacks on the US, and
that “if we leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy will
follow us here,” Bush stopped just short of accusing the Democratic
congressional leadership of treason and aiding terrorism.
The US president delivered
his address to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA),
a lobbying group representing big US agricultural interests. In 2004,
the NCBA endorsed Bush for reelection and directed nearly 90 percent
of its political contributions to Republican candidates.
On Thursday, the US Senate
cast its final vote on the supplemental funding bill, approving the
measure 51 to 47. The legislation includes over $100 billion in war
funding, plus some $20 billion more for domestic items ranging from
$1.6 billion for Gulf Coast storm damage relief to $100 million to pay
for security at the 2008 Democratic and Republican conventions.
Approval of the package was
a foregone conclusion after the defeat Tuesday of a Republican attempt
to strip language from the legislation setting a nonbinding goal for
the “redeployment” of US troops by March of 2008.
A similar piece of war-funding
legislation was approved by the House of Representatives last week calling
for the withdrawal of US “combat troops” by September 2008.
Both bills provide ample loopholes to allow the administration to continue
the war, and make clear that tens of thousands of US troops would remain
in Iraq for the stated purposes of defending US citizens and facilities,
conducting “anti-terrorist” operations and training Iraqi
security forces.
House and Senate Democratic
leaders indicated that differences between the two spending packages
would be ironed out in conference committee meetings beginning next
week, with a final version to be ready by the time the House returns
from its two-week break on April 16.
The actions on Capitol Hill
combined with the White House threat to veto the legislation have set
the stage for a reactionary showdown over which body is responsible
for “withholding support for our troops.”
In his speech before the
cattlemen on Wednesday, Bush set out to place blame squarely upon the
Democratic-led Congress.
“The American people
will know who to hold responsible,” he told his largely sympathetic
audience.
Once again he used the speech
to invoke the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as a justification
for his administration’s policies of war abroad and attacks on
democratic rights at home. “It is a day that our country must
never forget,” he declared, “and the lessons of that day
must never be forgot.” These he summed up as: “The best
way to protect this country is to defeat the enemy overseas so we don’t
have to face them here at home.”
The “enemy” that
Washington is now trying to defeat in Iraq, however, is the product
of Washington’s colonialist occupation itself, which is overwhelmingly
opposed by the people of Iraq.
Defending his so-called “surge”
of some 30,000 more US troops into Iraq, Bush claimed that the initial
escalation of US operations in Baghdad and Anbar Province have produced
“some early signs that are encouraging.” As evidence, he
cited a comment praising the US surge by “two Iraqi bloggers.”
It was later revealed that
the pair had actually written the propaganda piece earlier this month
and it had been republished on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Both of them had met with Bush in the Oval Office in 2004.
He also cited a letter from
a US Army sergeant claiming that the US operation was “picking
up momentum.”
In stark contrast to the
claims of success made by Bush and his supporters was the grim picture
presented by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, currently a professor at
the US Military Academy at West Point, who was given full access to
US commanders in Iraq during a recent trip and, upon his return, drafted
a memo recording what he found.
“The population is
in despair,” the former top US commander wrote. “Life in
many of the urban areas is now desperate.” He reported 2,900 IED
(roadside bomb) attacks on US forces a month, combined with thousands
more small arms, rocket and mortar attacks.
McCaffrey added: “There
is no function of government that operates effectively across the nation—not
health care, not justice, not education, not transportation, not labor
and commerce, not electricity, not oil production. There is no province
in the country in which the government has dominance.” The police
force, he added, “is feared as a Shia militia in uniform which
is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings.”
The general noted that “The
majority of the Iraqi population support armed attacks on American forces,”
and that the resistance to the occupation was popularly based, continually
growing despite the killing and imprisonment of tens of thousands of
Iraqi fighters.
The general went on to describe
an American military that is being systematically eroded by the Iraq
war, with current levels of deployment “unsustainable.”
He warned, however, that a “disaster in Iraq” would “endanger
America’s strategic interests (oil) in the Middle East for a generation.”
This is the reality underlying
the bitter political recriminations in Washington. Bush, in his denunciations
of the Democrats, is preparing a kind of “stab in the back”
explanation for the debacle that confronts US imperialism in Iraq, blaming
treacherous politicians for preventing victory.
“Yet at the very moment
that General Petraeus’s strategy is beginning to show signs of
success, the Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed an
emergency spending bill that undercuts him and the troops under his
command,” Bush charged. He accused the Democrats of setting “arbitrary
deadlines” and requiring that “American forces begin retreating
from Iraq ... regardless of conditions on the ground.”
Bush also demagogically attacked
the Democrats for including non-military appropriations in the supplemental
spending bill, as if this somehow tainted legislation “that’s
supporting our troops.” In reality, the administration’s
financing of the war through supplemental funding legislation is a means
of hiding from the public its real cost, which is now averaging nearly
$10 billion a month and is rapidly heading towards a total of $1 trillion.
This method allows the administration
to treat the war as something “off the books,” not counted
in budget deficit estimates or in calculating the impact of tax cuts
for the rich. After four years of occupation, the pretense that the
war costs are the result of an unanticipated “emergency”
is ludicrous. Politically, it represents one more means of consolidating
a presidential dictatorship in which Congress—which has willingly
collaborated in the process—exercises no control.
Once again casting the dirty
colonial war being waged by the US in Iraq as a crusade of good against
evil, Bush told the cattlemen, “If we cannot muster the resolve
to defeat this evil in Iraq, America will have lost its moral purpose
in the world, and we will endanger our citizens, because if we leave
Iraq before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here.”
Democrats reacted to the
heated rhetoric from the president. “Calm down with the threats,”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) said, referring to
Bush, at a Capitol Hill press conference Wednesday. “We respect
your constitutional role. We want you to respect ours.”
For all the attempts to cast
the clash over the supplemental spending bill as a historic showdown
between a White House bent on military victory and a congressional leadership
determined to end the war, leading Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly
stressed that the so-called deadlines in the legislation represent “goals”
not mandates, and that they envision substantial numbers of US troops
remaining in the country to protect Washington’s interests.
The New York Times Thursday
came to the defense of the Democrats against Bush’s attempts to
vilify them. In a lead editorial, the newspaper condemned the administration
for promoting “propaganda aimed at making Americans think there
is a debate going on between those who want to win the war and those
who want to lose. That’s nonsense, and the White House knows it.”
Indeed, the Democratic Party,
no less than the Republican, remains committed to defending the interests
of the US corporations and banks in the Middle East and in pursuing
the aims that underlay the war in Iraq from the beginning—seizure
of oil resources and assertion of American capitalist hegemony worldwide.
The dominant section of the party—along with a layer of Republicans—is
convinced that the tactics pursued by the Bush administration in Iraq
have fundamentally weakened the US position.
In the end, the most likely
resolution of the clash over the supplemental spending bill is a Democratic
retreat in the face of hysterical charges that the party’s insistence
on including its withdrawal language—not Bush’s veto—is
threatening to deprive US troops of supplies and ammunition. It is already
expected that the final bill being sent to the White House will be the
more watered-down version drafted by the Senate. And there have been
suggestions from some Democrats that a presidential veto could result
in a “compromise” under which funding would be provided
in separate installments, with no goals for troop redeployments attached.
The Democratic leadership’s
real attitude toward the war found another revealing expression in remarks
Wednesday by former Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., the new chairman
of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
In his first address to members
of the DLC—the most powerful caucus within the Democratic Party,
which includes the party’s putative front-runner for the 2008
presidential nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton—Ford
echoed Bush’s criticism of setting withdrawal dates.
“I think most Americans
want to win, they don’t want to see us leave early, and if we
leave prematurely, we may create a broader set of conflicts and invite
a bigger problem in that region than before leaving,” Ford said.
The DLC chairman called for
“forbearance,” proposed talks with Iran and Syria and suggested
that “we may end up with a partition-type government in Iraq.”
He likewise called for making the US military “bigger and stronger.”
This is the genuine face
of the Democratic Party, which is committed to militarism and the ruthless
defense of the interests of the American ruling elite, both at home
and abroad.
The differences between the
Democrats and Republicans over the Iraq war are over tactics, not fundamental
imperialist strategy. Underlying the increasingly heated rhetoric in
Washington are the immense political tensions that are emerging as the
result of growing popular opposition to the war itself, which can find
no genuine expression in the policies advanced by either major party.
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