I’ve been making an extra effort to pull my weight tonight on the baby front. So I’ve only caught fleeting moments of muted TV coverage and a few stray headlines. But one thing is clear. And that is that official Washington — or a lot of it — doesn’t get that democracy matters. The constitution gives the president great power and latitude in the exercise of his war powers. But not exclusive power. The president is not a king. Anybody who knows anything about the US constitution knows that it was designed specifically so that the president’s need to get the Congress to finance his wars would be an effective brake on the vast power he holds as commander-in-chief.
In practice, Congress’s power to declare war is little more than a nullity. War financing is where the constitutional rubber meets the road. It’s true that war declarations were far more regularly invoked before the last half century. But anyone who doubts that the framers saw the power to finance or not to finance as the Congress’s real power need only familiarize themselves wtih English constitutional history of the 17th and 18th century which was the framers’ point of reference.
I’m actually probably a lot less inclined to want the Congress trying to constrain the president’s hands with the power of the purse than a lot of readers of this site — not in this case specifically, but just in general, at an instinctual level. But over time — specifically over the the last five years — I’ve come to believe that this isn’t so much political wisdom or maturity as a less creditable inability, in spite of everything, to see that we have a president who has a basic contempt for our system of government and the rule of law and that the normal rules of inter-branch comity simply aren’t in effect.
The way this is ‘supposed’ to work is that when the president takes a dramatic new direction like this he consults with Congress. That way, some relative range of agreement can be worked out through consultation. National unity is great. Or at least that’s the theory.
But here we have a case where the president’s party has just been thrown out of power in Congress largely, though not exclusively, because the public is fed up with the president’s lies and failures abroad. (Indeed, at this point, what else does the Republican party stand for but corruption at home and failure abroad? Small government? Please.) The public now believes the war was a mistake. Decisive numbers believe we should start the process of leaving Iraq. And the public is overwhelmingly against sending more troops to the country. The country’s foreign policy establishment (much derided, yes, but look at the results) is also overwhelmingly against escalation.
And yet, with all this, the president has ignored the Congress, not consulted the 110th Congress in any real way, has ignored the now longstanding views of the majority of the country’s citizens and wants to plow ahead with an expansion of his own failed and overwhelmingly repudiated policy. The need for Congress to assert itself in such a case transcends the particulars of Iraq policy. It’s important to confirm the democratic character of the state itself. The president is not a king. He is not a Stuart. And one more Hail Mary pass for George W. Bush’s legacy just isn’t a good enough reason for losing more American lives, treasure and prestige.
Lobbyists? What lobbyists? Republicans, headed up by the “un-Santorum,” create the un-K-Street-Project. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Game on. Sen. Kennedy introduces legislation that would make President Bush get specific authorization through Congress for a troop “surge.”
While we’re all talking about the president’s ‘surge’ plan, I want to make sure everyone sees Fred Kaplan’s piece in Slate yesterday. It’s a good example of why the most appropriate name for what the president is planning is neither ‘surge’ nor even ‘escalation’ but rather ‘punt’ — a strategically meaningless increase in troops meant to allow the president to avoid dealing with the failure of his policy and lay the ground work for getting the next president to take the blame for his epochal screw-up.
One of the ironies of the current 
situation is that in the early months of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who’s slated to take over in Iraq, was the general on the ground who all the sharpest people on military affairs thought was the one guy in charge over there who really understood what kind of a battle he was engaged in. In short, counter-insurgency, or rather, heading off an insurgency by prioritizing real reconstruction and hearts-and-minds work rather than kicking people’s doors down.
He spent last year co-authoring the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual. But look at what the manual says. Counter-insurgency operations require at least 20 combat troops per 1000 people in a given area. And look closely. That’s not just military personnel, but combat troops.
Kaplan runs through the numbers. But the key points are that you’d need 120,000 combat troops to mount real counter-insurgency operations just in Baghdad. We currently have 70,000 combat troops in the whole country. So concentrate all US combat personnel in Iraq into Baghdad. Then add 20,000 more ‘surge’ combat troops. That leaves you 30,000 short of the number the Army thinks you’d need just in Baghdad.
Needless to say, Iraq isn’t just Baghdad. And if you know anything about how insurgencies work you know that if we actually had enough troops in Baghdad (remember, to even get in shooting distance of that you need to evacuate the rest of the country) the insurgents would just fan out and start literal or figurative fires where we’re not.
What this all amounts to is that 20,000 or even 50,000 new combat troops don’t even get you close to what the Army says you need to do what President Bush says he’s now going to try to do. To get that many troops into the country you’d need to put this country on a serious war-footing and begin drawing troops down from deployments around the globe. All of which, just isn’t going to happen, setting aside for the moment of what should happen. And that tells you this whole thing is just a joke at the expense of the American public and our troops on the ground in Iraq.
What’s sad about this (and it’s hard to know where to start on that count) is that a few years ago, much, much more would have been possible with more troops on the ground. Alternatively, if the president and his key advisors hadn’t lied to the country about the number of troops required to stabilize and police Iraq (then-Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said 400k+, I think) we might not have pulled the trigger in the first place.
We’re living in the wreckage of the president’s lies. And this is just one more of them.
All in the family: Incoming White House counsel Fred Fielding isn’t the first of his family to work for the administration. His daughter Alexandra joined Lynne Cheney’s staff in 2002.
Maybe she put in a good word for dad?
Santorum headed to K Street.
Sort of like the journey of the Salmon returning to the ancestral stream, I guess. Maybe I’m watching too many Salmon docs.
Paul Kiel’s got more of our run-down here on the war-financing issues related to President Bush’s claim to be a king. But it occurs to me that this ‘debate’ is really only a debate if you see this not as wrestling over policy between the president and the Congress but as President Bush as an epochal figure, a man of destiny in a grand historical struggle who has powers to answer to grander than Congress or the constitution. I know that may seem like hyperbole saying that. But if you listen to this conversation, I really think that’s the subtext. Sure, Congress has the power of the purse, the thinking seems to go. But this is bigger than Congress. Bigger than the niceties of the constitution. This is his rendezvous with destiny in Iraq, the key battle in World War IV or IX (I don’t remember which we’re up to.)
At a certain level this isn’t that complicated. The president and the Congress have a set of intentionally countervailing powers. And it is within that framework that we, as a nation, hash out our direction on great matters of the day like this one. But what I’m hearing is that what President Bush is up to in Iraq is bigger than all that.
And that leaves us in the dangerous position of the constitution vs. the president’s grandiosity.