 Should Democrats Form a 'Benedict Arnold' Caucus? By Joel Himelfarb Published: November 26, 2007
Lawmakers Attack Troops and Corporations Who Try to Keep America Safe
Two pieces of unfinished business that Congress failed to address before the Thanksgiving recess -- reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and paying for U.S. military operations against jihadist terror -- illustrate how irresponsibly the 110th Congress behaves on national security issues.
Judging from their current behavior, most Democrat congressional leaders seem more concerned with appeasing MoveOn.Org and the rest of their left-wing base than in providing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with sufficient funding to do their jobs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other congressional leaders talk about "supporting the troops," but on Capitol Hill they have embarked on a reckless game of political "chicken" that endangers the lives of these soldiers and those of countless Iraqis and Afghan Muslims who have risked their lives by cooperating with the United States.
Even as Congress found time before leaving town to shove plenty of pork into the defense budget (including $3 million in funding to teach children to play golf), it embarked on a reckless course of action that would cripple the war effort while leaving as few Democrat fingerprints as possible.
On Nov. 14, the Defense Department warned that it is running out of funding for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hours later, Mrs. Pelosi and her political cadres in the House responded with a largely-party line 218-203 vote to send President Bush a defense appropriations measure containing a poison pill they knew would ensure a presidential veto, so they could blame the president for the failure to provide funding. Mr. Bush requested $196 billion, enough to fund military operations in those countries for another 12 months; instead, the House voted to provide $50 billion -- just one-quarter of his request -- and to provide that money only if the president agrees to a pullout timetable -- in other words, a surrender date. The bill requires that the United States immediately begin withdrawing soldiers from Iraq with the goal of removing virtually all U.S. troops by December 2008.
Of course, this would signal to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami and Shi'ite jihadists that if they wait another 12 months or so, victory will be theirs. This would reverse all of the success achieved by Gen. David Petraeus' s troop "surge," which has dramatically reduced the violence in onetime hotbeds of terror like Baghdad and Anbar and Diyala provinces. In the Senate, Democrats blocked passage of a Republican bill that would have provided $70 billion for the war without a surrender date -- enough to fund operations for slightly more than four months.
Reid, Pelosi and other prominent Democrats like House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey have said that Congress will withhold funding for the rest of this year unless Bush agrees to a pullout timetable, and the military is about to bear the brunt of the Democrats determination to stick it to Bush. "There is a misconception that the department can continue funding our troops in the field for an indefinite period of time through accounting maneuvers," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said after the House vote. "This is a serious misconception." Gates (who is about the last person in Washington that one could call a partisan bombthrower) noted that Congress has provided DoD with very limited flexibility to deal with the funding shortage.
Under "general transfer authority," the Pentagon can transfer no more than $3.7 billion -- enough to cover one week's worth of war money. If the situation continues, the Pentagon would cease funding for all Army posts by mid-February, which would result in the furloughing of approximately 100,000 government employees and another 100,000 contract employees working there. If the stalemate continues, the Marines would have to begin making similar moves in March.
Many of the contract employees, Pentagon officials told The Washington Times, are spouses and family members working on Army posts, providing secondary income for family members. "These layoffs would have a cascading effect on depots and procurement," noted Gates. The furlough notices could begin going out this week. (Remember this the next time you hear lectures from the Democrats about how Bush and the Republicans have "broken" the military and have no regard for the sacrifices that soldiers and their families have been making.)
Not content with blocking war funding, Democrat leaders have been attempting to work their magic on troop and public morale. "It's not getting better; it's getting worse," Reid asserted -- even as new evidence continues to come in showing precisely the opposite -- that the U.S. troop surge has resulted in tangible gains. For example, U.S. military fatalities dropped from 101 in June to 39 last month. Iraqi civilian deaths plummeted from 1,791 in August to 750 last month. Mortar rocket attacks in October were the lowest since February 2006 -- when al Qaeda's destruction of a venerable Shi'ite mosque in Samarra touched off a dramatic upsurge in violence.
Pelosi says that, even if it is true that violence is declining, that isn't enough to persuade her to support the mission in Iraq because the Iraqis have yet to achieve political reconciliation. Murtha, who chairs the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, says that victory in Iraq is impossible and promises to continue tightening the purse strings until the president accepts a withdrawal plan. The sad reality is that the U.S. Congress today is run by politicians who are totally invested in a narrative of American failure and defeat. No amount of evidence is going to change the reality that these politicians have tied their political futures to the notion that failure is inevitable -- and they are impervious to facts suggesting that victory can be achieved. Defeatism and American decline become self-fulfilling prophecies, and as long as people with this worldview remain in the majority in Congress, any president who tries to behave responsibly in dealing with the jihadist threat abroad is in for a bruising political fight.
Another example of reckless behavior is the question of fixing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Bush administration quite sensibly wants to clarify that U.S. intelligence agencies do have the authority to monitor overseas telephone calls and other electronic communications made by suspected terrorist operatives without obtaining prior court approval. After a series of rulings earlier this year by a special court overseeing FISA called this authority into question if such communications were routed through switches located in the United States, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell (who previously served as director of the National Security Agency under President Clinton) persuaded Congress to approve a six-month fix which ends in February.
Now that too is in jeopardy. Before its Thanksgiving recess, the House, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, aided a lobbying campaign by the ACLU and blogs like ThinkProgress, approved a FISA bill that would effectively reverse the fix passed in August. Even worse, the House bill denies retroactive liability protection to telecommunications companies who are facing lawsuits from "privacy advocates" for cooperating with federal efforts to wiretap terrorists following September 11.
In the Senate, Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller has behaved responsibly: Working together with ranking member Sen. Kit Bond, Rockefeller has crafted a compromise that would give retroactive liability to the telecoms -- an essential provision that was left out of the six-month bill passed in August. Unfortunately, however, the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Patrick Leahy and Ranking Member Arlen Specter, has approved a bill denying retroactive liability (adopting the same position as the House.).
This creates a bizarre political situation where Specter, a senior Republican, is joining with the political left in the most irresponsible way, while a pair of senior liberal Democrats (Rockefeller and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a senior Judiciary Committee member) are doing the right thing: helping to ensure that patriotic corporate citizens of the United States are not harassed and hauled into court for violating the civil liberties of an al Qaeda functionary in Baghdad who telephones an associate in Damascus or Karachi.
. It is beyond shameful that in wartime, Congress is actually debating 1) whether to slash money for the troops on the battlefield and 2) whether to subject American companies to legal harassment; companies who, acting in good faith, try to help the government monitor terrorist communications overseas.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is the assistant editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times. read full author bio here |