Money in Iraq
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published May 11, 2007, 2:54 pm in Military / Foreign policy, Voting & Partisanship.
I'm waiting to see what the House is going to do next. The spending bill to bring the troops home by a date was passed, vetoed, and then not passed. What will they do now? The Democrats are saying two things: one, the people want the troops home, so they will do everything they can to do that; two, it's time for Bush to compromise.
But wait, this is Bush. This is the great non-compromiser, the guy whose primary appeal to voters was that he had sticktoitness, the opposite of John Kerry, the flip-flopper. And the now the Democrats are saying it's time for him to compromise? Heck, he's already come out and said that he will veto a bill that calls for another spending vote in July. Anything that doesn't give him a blank check, he's going to veto it.
Do we respect this or not? Well, kind of. Even though I'm not sure he doesn't need some oversight, he does, in fact, not need the Democrats doing everything in their power to stymie the war in Iraq. So what's a pundit like me to do? I'm generally not one to call it like it is, for that's just another term for jerk. But I will say this: Bush needs to compromise. It will be hard for him, but he needs to do it. What should the Democrats do? Perhaps they should give him less money?
Is that even an option? Really, if they want the troops home by a certain date, they can only provide enough money for the war to do through a specific date. That seems like a plan. Tell him, sure, run your war, but you only have this much money to do it on. Boy, will the Democrats be unpopular for that vote. But it's really not unfeasible. Consider like this: I'm currently renovating our house, but I'm on a budget. A budget makes sense because it keeps me from not only spending more money than I have, but it keeps me from spending more on the house than the house can support. If I spend $100,000, but the house is only valued at $90,000, well, dang it, I spent more than I should. Perhaps this is the kind of budget Bush needs to keep him from doing more than Iraq deserves. How to measure how much the country deserves is a bit more difficult than figuring out how much a house is worth (trust me, there's no exact way to do it), but the point stands. Perhaps a budget would be a good thing for him.
But Bush will just veto the bill and demand more money, saying that the Democrats are actively hurting our troops. And Gates, the Secretary of Defense, has said that even a bill that required another vote for more spending as soon as July is too demanding. Why? Because the military would have already overspent more than they were appropriated. Once they ran out of money, they would have to start cutting things. What would they cut? Well, they would just keep fighting the war with what they had--the current troops, the current armor, whatever. And that's the problem with making Bush stick to a budget. He'll do like my wife wants to do with our house. My wife says that we need to fix X, Y, and Z with $30,000. That means you can't do it the way you want it: you can't get the flooring you want or the stove that you want; instead you have to get things that are a bit cheaper. Me? I want to say, ok, I can't do X, Y, and Z for $30,000, at least not the way I want it. So instead, I will only do X and Y. That way, I get what I want until I have another $10,000 to do Z. I can live with the current state of affairs until I get more money. Bush, he probably wouldn't do that. He would keep pressing on, and would blame the Democrats every time a soldier got killed. I imagine what Tony Snow would say: "If only that troop who died today had had the proper armor in his Humvee, he would have survived that blast." But is that really logical?
Well, yeah, I guess it is, depending on what your idea of a budget is. If Bush agreed with me, he would do what he could for the amount of money and then stop. But then, that's why I'm not in charge of giving Bush money.
But what am I talking about anyway? Heck, I actually agree that Bush should have a blank check. He needs to win this war, after all. He needs the money to finish the job, to stay there until every enemy is squashed. Yes, I know I sound hawkish. Frankly, I sometimes have that tendency. The alternative, however, just doesn't work. Perhaps we will just keep losing in Iraq, but I think we can eventually win it. Will we just keep spending money and lives until we have to eventually pull out? Maybe so, and that would be a shame if it's the case. No one wants another Iraq, after all. We all want our troops to be out of there and for everything to be settled.
But that's the rub, isn't it? Iraq is NOT settled, and it won't be any more settled if we leave. The people who say that pulling out will make the Iraqis step up to the plate are misleading us. If we pull out, the country spirals into more civil war until the radicals win and we have another Tehran or Riyadh in the Middle East. Is that a viable alternative? I guess so. That's real democracy at work.
So my advice to the Democrats? Give Bush the money and let him screw it up. Then get a Democrat in office who can pull out and let the country descend into chaos. But that's partly what the Democrats are afraid of: if they don't mandate that Bush pulls out now, then the next President will be the one who has to do it, and it will make him or her look bad, not the current Bush.
Man, it's a bad situation. What I wish is that Maliki could take control and they could establish a real government. As it is, no option is worth it.
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