End This Filthy War

Democrats, show some life to save lives.

by David Faris

After six full years of George W. Bush, the advantages of parliamentary democracy are clear. In any sane system, a president whose approval rating has been hovering around the Flyers' winning percentage of 37 percent for the better part of two years would be history. Instead, he remains fastened in place like a staple on our collective forehead, repeating the same tired mantras about winning the war on terror and making progress in Iraq, all the while blocking the Democrats' attempt to punch a return ticket for our battered armed forces.

Bush hopes to reprise the budget battle of 1995-96, in which Bill Clinton successfully blamed the GOP Congress for an impasse that shut down the federal government. Clinton rode triumphantly to re-election while the Republicans realized that no one had notarized their Contract with America. The difference this time, aside from the fact that Clinton was a Rhodes scholar and Bush probably wouldn't even get past the phone interview for Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?, is that Congress is right and the American people agree with the Democrats and not the president.

No one wants the United States in Iraq anymore. We're like Christmas guests who have stayed for Easter, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Our nervous hosts are looking at the calendar and wondering if they should either call the cops or build another bathroom. Majorities of Iraqis and Americans want us to strip the sheets off the bed, get in the car and get the hell out. And a recent poll indicated that Americans would rather Congress stand pat and withhold funding rather than capitulate to King George's decrees.

And while Bush acts personally offended by the Democrats' refusal to do exactly what he wants, the withdrawal plan is perfectly reasonable. The pullout date is comfortably in the future and would allow the international community plenty of time to make other arrangements for Iraqi security. And the impending departure of American troops should allow for necessary compromises to be made with the insurgents while not disturbing the underlying arrangements in Iraq's painstakingly constructed constitution.

If Bush won't agree to a withdrawal date, Congress should go nuclear and pull the funding altogether. It might remind the president that Congress is a co-equal branch of government and that the power to declare and end wars actually rests with the legislative and not the executive branch. Bush probably doesn't remember the War Powers Act because he was coked out and hiding somewhere from the Texas Air National Guard when it passed in 1973, but Congress has every right to end this war. It's another case of this administration's preening, monarchical pretensions running into the reality of the Constitution.

But people might not want Congress to pull funding for the troops in the same way that no one ever wants unions to go on strike: They admire the institutional power but never want it used. Some warn darkly about what happened to Democrats after they shut down funding for the Vietnam War, followed inevitably by some comment about helicopters evacuating terrified Americans from Saigon rooftops.

Well they can rest easy. We can't evacuate Americans from Iraq by helicopter because it's no longer particularly safe to fly the things there. We'll have to find a different way to get Americans off the buildings, or better yet, encourage people to find other routes out of Iraq. If one thing is certain after New Orleans, it is that this government is no good at rescuing people from rooftops.

Don't forget that the Democrats won a presidential election a year after South Vietnam fell to the communists. And more importantly, ending the Vietnam War was the right thing to do.

Tens of thousands of Americans had already died needlessly for a ginned-up, unnecessary fight that the military was incapable of winning, and untold thousands more would now be dead had Congress not shown the courage to face the music of a lost conflict.

Congressional Democrats should stick together and end this filthy war. They should end it before any more kids get themselves blown up fighting for the hallucinatory fever dreams of right-wing intellectuals and the wounded pride of the most spectacularly failed presidency in modern American history. And they should end it even if doing so puts them at political risk and provokes a long-overdue confrontation between the branches.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.