How'd that work out for ya, Harry? Schultz is a former Republican who still has trouble fathoming the cowardice of Democrats. But, so do we all. The complete obliviousness of the Senate Majority Leader and most other members of the Senate and House to the message that hundreds of thousands of activists were constantly e-mailing, phone calling, faxing, lobbying, and interrupting public events with was extremely frustrating. Even those who had begun pushing for an end to the war gave up hope. When asked in a public meeting to lead a filibuster of the next funding bill, Senator Feingold refused to attempt it.
Feingold, and the rest of us, were done in by a piece of childish nonsense repeated endlessly and unanimously by the univocal US corporate media: ending the funding would conflict with "supporting the troops." When we frame the debate over war money with the idea that funding war amounts to "supporting troops," the debate gets constrained: should we fund the war, or fund the war more and faster? If, on the other hand, a debate over funding a war were framed by the idea that what you're funding is not troops, but a war, then one possible position in the debate would favor cutting off the funds. While you can cut off funds for war or Halliburton or Blackwater, you can never cut off funds for troops. I don't mean that you physically can't. I mean that politically it is impossible that any politician is going to support something understood to mean "cutting off funds for troops." But if we understood that the troops are going to have better living conditions and a higher chance of living, period, if we bring them home, and if we could talk about cutting off funds for profiteers, then cutting off the funds would become politically possible.
Then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified as follows before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "Be careful about criticizing the Department." Gonzales suggested that criticizing him amounted to "attacking the career professionals [in the Justice Department]." Senator Dick Durbin responded to this by blurting out a bit of seldom-spoken truth: "That's like saying anyone who disagrees with the president's policy on the war is attacking the soldiers." Yet Durbin and his colleagues were in the press every single day defensively promoting the idea that refusing to fund war amounts to not supporting soldiers. The troops would have been amazed and bewildered to learn that they might be receiving funding and that bringing them home would constitute an attack on them. The majority of those serving in Iraq had told pollsters in 2006 that they wanted the war ended that year.
I tried to call the bluffs of all the "support the troopsers". Each time they passed another "supplemental" it amounted to approximately $1 million per troop in Iraq. I proposed actually giving the troops that money. If the money was for the troops, then give the troops the damn money, I said, a million dollars each. Put it right in their hands. The troops that wanted to give part or all of their share to the contractors and mercenaries and profiteers could do that. Those who wanted to fund a continued occupation could do that. Some would probably share a little with Iraqis. And those who chose to could buy a plane ticket home. After all, General David Petraeus had bragged to Congress about how the United States was selling commercial airplanes to Iraq. Somebody needed to use them. Alas, Congress ignored my proposal, as well as all serious proposals and bills that involved cutting off the flow of funds. In fact, if Congressman Obey was at all typical, Congress members considered any proposals to stop funding the war to be ideas suited only to "idiot liberals."
Obey was a top Democrat in charge of drafting the bills to fund the wars. Tina Richards was the mother of an Iraq War veteran about to be deployed to Iraq for the third time. They spoke in the hallway of a Congressional office building, and the encounter was captured on video:
RICHARDS: Hi, I'm Tina Richards. I had left a poem that my son had written [with one of your staffers]. I was wondering if he ever got it to you? He's a United States Marine, he's done two tours in Iraq. He's going to be deployed for a third tour.
OBEY: I honestly don't know, I'm so buried in appropriations bills, I only get back over here for about ten minutes a day. I've seen very little in my office.
RICHARDS: OK, because my son is suffering from PTSD, he's had several suicide attempts.
OBEY: I'm sorry to hear that.
RICHARDS: He tried to get help through the V.A., and it took us six months to get his first appointment with the V.A. In ten minutes they told him, "It sounds like you've got childhood issues." But he was able to do four years in the Marines, two deployments to Iraq, honorable discharge, presidential unit citation, and he was just fine for that, and now that he needs help from the V.A. he's been told that he's got childhood issues.
OBEY: We're holding hearings today and Wednesday. They're continually screwing those guys. The Washington Post is full of it.
RICHARDS: Well I've been talking about this for over a year now, and nobody seems to be paying much attention.
OBEY: Well, I guarantee what's happening at Walter Reed...[indecipherable] "whole damn thing"
RICHARDS: Well what about the, are you going to be voting against the supplemental?
OBEY: Absolutely not, I'm the sponsor of it for heaven sakes. [Note: that didn't stop him from voting against the June 2008 supplemental after it was clear it would pass. Pelosi, too, voted No after orchestrating passage.]
RICHARDS: For the . . . uhh . . . to continue the war?
OBEY: It doesn't. The President wants to continue the war. We're trying to use the supplemental to end the war, but you can't end the war by going against the supplemental. It's time these idiot liberals understand that. There's a big difference between funding the troops and ending the war. I'm not gonna deny body armor. I'm not gonna deny funding for veterans hospitals, defense hospitals, so you can help people with medical problems, that's what you're gonna do if you're going against that bill. [Note: You could of course fund veterans' care in a separate bill. You could do the same with body armor, except that it's not needed in most US neighborhoods, and you'd be bringing our men and women home. You could also fund wars separately from the rest of the military budget, but still within the normal governmental budget, if you were David Obey and chose to do so.]RICHARDS: There should be enough money already in the regular defense bills . . .
OBEY: (interrupting) Well there isn't.
RICHARDS: . . . without continuing the funding for the war.
OBEY: There isn't. There isn't. That's not the way it works. The money in the defense bill, it pays for a standing army, but it doesn't pay for these recurring costs. We're gonna add over a billion dollars more to what the President was asking for in that bill, so we can deal with exactly the type of problems you're talking about. How the hell do you get money to the hospitals if you don't provide the funding?
RICHARDS: Are you going to be in support of . . .
OBEY: I hate the war. I voted against it to start with. I was the first guy in Congress to call for Rumsfeld's resignation, but we don't have the votes to defund the war, we shouldn't because that also means defunding everything in that bill to help the guys who are the victims of war.
RICHARDS: Well there's an amendment to the supplemental that's being proposed to fully fund the withdrawal of the troops.
OBEY: That makes no sense. It doesn't work that way. The language we have in the resolution ends the authority for the war, it makes it illegal to proceed with the war. You don't have to defund something if the war doesn't exist. [NOTE: Obey's bill did no such thing, and in any case would not have meant that Richards' suggestion made no sense. Arguably, continuing to fund something that didn't exist would have made less sense than defunding it.]
RICHARDS: Oh, I didn't know that was in the supplemental.
OBEY: That's the problem, that's the problem. (Emphatic right arm gesturing) The liberal groups are jumping around without knowing what the hell is in the bill! You don't have to cut off the funding for an activity that no longer is legal! [Note: read that last sentence a few times.]
RICHARDS: Oh, and then approach it from that way.
OBEY: We're shutting it off.
How'd that work out for ya, David? The occupation of Iraq is as strong now as then and no serious withdrawal is underway. At this point, Pete Perry, a peace activist who was with Richards, joined the conversation:
PERRY: What about the Church amendment that helped end the Vietnam war back in "72, "73?
OBEY: (Emphatically, voice raised) It took us 31 different efforts to get there, I was here for that.
PERRY: OK.
OBEY: I know what the hell I'm talking about.
PERRY: Did that end the ground war in Vietnam?
OBEY: No it didn't. The political pressure on the administration ended the war. The amendment that finally ended the funding was the [undecipherable] amendment, I was the sponsor of that amendment . . .
PERRY: But if you pass the resolution, isn't he still the Commander in Chief? Then . . .
OBEY: (Voice raised.) We don't have the votes to pass it! We couldn't even get the votes to pass a non-binding resolution one week ago! How the hell do you think we're gonna get the votes to cut off the war?
PERRY: By stopping the funding. [Note: Perry may have been suggesting the option of not bringing any funding bills to a vote. In any case, Obey was clearly stuck in the mindset of having to pass a bill in order to accomplish anything.]
OBEY: How, if you don't have the votes? It takes two hundred . . .
PERRY: With a filibuster his supplemental request.
OBEY: There is no filibuster in the House.
PERRY: In the Senate they could do it, and all they need is 41 votes. [Note: This was true, and Obey had no response to it.]
OBEY: I'm sorry. . . . No I'm not gonna vote for it . . . . I'm the sponsor of the bill that's gonna be on the floor, and that bill ends the war . . . if that isn't good enough for you, then you're smoking something that ain't legal! [Of course, funding wars of aggression is not legal, and Obey's bill did not in any way end any war and couldn't possibly have done so, because such a bill would have been vetoed if it made it through the Senate. Obey's bill actually contained a non-binding suggestion to the president to eventually partially end the war, and even that was destined to be vetoed.]
PERRY: No I'm not, sir, no I'm not.
OBEY: You got your facts screwed up.
PERRY: It's non-binding. How would it affect what he's doing on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
OBEY: We don't have the votes! (He opens right side of suit jacket.) Do you see a magic wand in my pocket?
PERRY: No.
OBEY: How the hell are we gonna got the votes for it? We ain't got the votes! We do have the votes if you guys quit screwin' it up. We do have the votes to end the legal authority to end the war, that's the same as defunding it. (At this point a staffer approaches Rep. Obey and taps him on the arm.)
PERRY: Tell us how we can help.
OBEY: I'm not going to debate it, you've got your facts wrong. (Obey then turns and walks away with his staffer to enter his office.)
The corporate media was playing along with the notion that the Democrats were opposing a war by funding it. It's not surprising that Obey would not appreciate being confronted with the grotesqueness of this. Imagine if Obey or Pelosi had decided to mortgage their house, empty their bank accounts, max out their credit cards, and give all that money to Halliburton with a little gift card expressing their sincere opposition to everything Halliburton did. They would have looked no more foolish than they did, and I'd have preferred that scenario because they'd have been leaving the rest of us out of it.
In the spring of 2008 Democrats.com commissioned a poll from a corporate polling company asking questions that none of the other pollsters were asking. It found that a majority of Americans wanted Congress to cut off the funding and demand that the president end the war within six months. That was a majority of the rightful sovereigns of this country, and they had heard more about Iraq than any other topic in the news over the preceding six years. If Obey wouldn't trust us on this one, what would he ever trust us on? Perhaps on Afghanistan.
Here is Obey's statement from Thursday, and it begins by framing defunding war as supporting troops:
We owe it to our troops to bring hardnosed realism to whatever we ask them to do
When the Appropriations Committee approved the supplemental request for Pakistan and Afghanistan funding earlier this year, we made it quite clear in the Committee Report that the Administration needed to evaluate the tools available to implement whatever strategy the United States decided to follow.
The point we tried to make is that the United States government could have the most coherent policy in the world, but if it did not have the tools to implement it, that policy would be futile. Unfortunately, the only tools available to the United States in that part of the world are the Afghani and Pakistani governments.
In Pakistan, we have virtually no boots on the ground, so whatever we seek to achieve, in the end, has to go through the Pakistani government. The disadvantage of that is that the Pakistani government, up to now, has been a mighty weak reed to lean on. The advantage of that is that we will probably encounter less resentment targeted against the United States then we would encounter if we had a larger military footprint; and that is a good thing. And if the Pakistani government is belatedly focusing on the dangers presented to regional stability by the Taliban instead of being distracted by their previous focus on India, then hooray -- perhaps we have a chance to achieve some degree of stability in that country. The odds are against us, but the recent change in Pakistani attitudes may give us a chance.
