Taking off the Training Wheels

What do the Democrats want?

According to the Senate's vote yesterday, the Democrats want to bring home combat troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008. However, I'm not sure if they really want to be responsible for the results of that proposal. I sure wouldn't.

Here is this morning's BBC article about Bush's rather unsurprising and underwhelming response:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6504105.stm


The dialogue between the parties has been so frustrating lately that I can't really decide where I stand on this war. I can't believe that the Democrats have set themselves up for failure again by taking the opposite extreme from the Bush administration. When I say failure, I'm talking about the 2008 presidential election.

Let me go on record with my prediction right now, but let me preface it with one of Bush's quotes from the article:

"If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible."

Congress (aka, The Democrats). The Democrats will be responsible. Bush is doing what American politicians do best; he is spinning this thing from the very beginning so that his party comes out on top. My prediction: If Congress stops funding the war and Iraq collapses, the Republicans will find a way to blame the whole disaster on the Democratic Congress, and will win the 2008 election by spinning the whole thing just as Bush did above.


My prediction, however, is nullified by the fact that this bill isn't going to pass anyway. I believe Bush will veto this one (rather than bypassing the veto process with signing statements as he has done unrelentingly so far), and there is not a chance in hell that Congress will find a 2/3 majority to overturn the veto.

So we will be back to square one. The Democrats will go back to the drawing board and try to plot their next attack, encouraged by the fact that Senate actually took formal action against the war (fruitless though it may have been). They will continue to act as if the political momentum is on their side, even though that attitude is exactly what made them lose an impossible-to-lose election in 2004. The Senate Republicans will go back to their side and argue about who they should support for their party's presidential nomination (which is another way of saying "Who among us wants to inherit this DISASTER of a war and try to justify our persistence in the Middle East to an intensely skeptical voting public?").

Meanwhile President Bush and Vice President Cheney will continue to make speeches in which they talk about Iraq as if it is a child learning to ride a bike without training wheels. "Come on Iraq, you can do it, I've got you!" But the problem is that Iraq is learning to ride a bike on a gravel road...full of potholes...filled with insurgency explosives. And as we run behind them holding onto them and keeping them stable we step in the potholes ourselves, gradually losing our will (and our limbs) while our congress...ahem...I mean our conscience keeps telling us that maybe Iraq doesn't want to learn to ride a bike, or maybe we're not qualified to teach them considering that we aren't their parents, in fact we killed their parents in 2003 (but it's ok becuase their parents were assholes). Besides, our bike hasn't worked for more than 40 years. This kid named Vietnam had just learned to ride a bike back then and said that if someone would let him borrow a bike he would be their friend forever. Too bad The Soviets beat us to it and let Vietnam borrow a funky Soviet bike. Then Vietnam said our bike was girly and couldn't go as fast, so we kicked him right in his Gulf of Tonkin. Then he stole our bike for a while and it took us ten years to get it back, but the gears were all messed up and the back wheel never seemed to be going in the same direction as the front one. Since then we haven't had the money to get it fixed, and every time we do have the money we spend it on toy tanks and guns. We can't just let Iraq go now, because they'll fall over. But if we don't let go soon all the other neighbors are going to start to notice and wonder why we think we're qualified to teach Iraq how to ride a bike.



The fourth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq came and went recently and the press didn't even make a big deal of it, as if we are already bracing ourselves for a decade-long debacle reminiscent of Vietnam. The problem is, my friends, that America is in the twilight of its time as the most powerful nation on Earth. I've been saying it for a few years now, but it's becoming a frightening reality. We can't keep acting like we are somehow qualified to dictate the world's actions, because our economic, diplomatic and military influence is waning rapidly. Audacity without influence is going to be our undoing. Mark my words. I'll write more about that next time.