Congress Goes On The Record

Dr. Samuel Johnson once famously said that "there is nothing so hopeless as a scheme of merriment", but then Dr. Johnson never heard of the 110th Congress of the United States of America. In yet another symbolic gesture by a Congress which is quickly establishing its reputation as the king of symbolic gestures, an political maneuver called the war funding resolution was passed last week along mostly partisan lines. I'm sure you heard the news but I just thought I'd mention it in case you missed it.

The centerpiece of the resolution, of course, is the requirement that all U.S. troops be withdrawn from Iraq by September 2008, a date conveniently close to the next election (a coincidence, I'm sure). Oops, I should apologize for that parenthetical remark. I'm sure this resolution, despite the fact that it narrowly passed the House and has little chance of passing in the Senate and absolutely no chance of overriding a presidential veto, has nothing whatsoever to do with the next election. I'm sure it is not intended to put the Democratic Party on the record as being against the war or to provide a platform from which they can attack the Republicans in the '08 campaign, which, believe it or not has started already (here's hoping that the next round of presidential candidates waits at least until the next president is sworn in before launching their 2012 campaigns).

Ok, I'm kidding. It's a purely partisan political resolution. Why else would the House waste the people's time and money passing a bill that has no chance of being enacted. Because they actually think that announcing a ending date for the war is a good idea? I wouldn't be surprised if Nancy Pelosi is already rehearsing her convention speech.

That said, the resolution does put the Democrats in a very awkward position, doesn't it? I mean if at some level the Dems have to be hoping that the slaughter in Iraq or else they're going to look mighty foolish come election time.

Can you imagine? If some actual semblance of peace is restored to Baghdad and we do manage to get the electricity turned on and the water running and at least a faint pulse of commerce and employment pumping through its veins, then the Democrats are going to look downright peevish for wanting to bail out in March of '07. Of course as things stand now that doesn't seem likely, but who knows? Let's just hope for the Dems sake that radicalism spreads and thousands more Iraqi's die before the next election. Well, not really, but let's face it, after taking this position the only good news for the Democrats is going to be more bad news from Iraq.

Getting back to the real world and the real issues at hand, though, wasn't that an interesting idea that King Abdullah II of Jordan raised last month. In case you weren't paying attention, he suggested that perhaps one of the answers for all of this instability in the Middle East would be to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He seemed to think that finding some settlement to that decades old conflict could relieve a lot of the tension that's been festering in the Arab world, and maybe help combat the rise of radicalism in the region.

Well the nerve of that guy. Coming here to the United States and trying to tell us how to manage our relations with the Arab world. Luckily the Congress didn't pay him no mind. Nope. They just sat down with their political consultants and, after reviewing the poll numbers, decided that peace in the Middle East wasn't going to resonate with the voters in the '08 campaign, so they quickly scrapped that idea and went back to work on their resolution.

Then again, what that Abdullah fella was saying did make some sense. After all, these Al-Qaeda folks ain't like your conventional type armies. As one person said, they're more like the internet. That is, they're distributed, and there's no central place where you can strike and deal a death blow. It's just a bunch of independent cells, and if you kill one then the other cells still go on and grow even more cells.

Seems to me that the best way to fight something like that is to starve them out - you know, deny them the recruits they need to grow. I mean, how many people are there in the world who are willing to tie a bomb around their bellies and go blow themselves up. I bet there's a limited pool, and since radicalism thrives in a climate of poverty and anger then a peaceful and economically viable Palestinian state might not be such a bad thing, especially if the prosperity managed to spread itself throughout the Middle East. Well, it ain't gonna happen in a day and it ain't gonna happen by the next election, so for America, at least, that whole idea is a nonstarter.

The only thing that matters now is that we make Bush pay for this war. After all, it's all his fault. It's his war and we had nothing to do with it. Why we were out there in our yards pruning the roses and we come back inside and find out he's got us in this war - out of the blue, just like that. Caught us completely by surprise. So now we've got to get Bush and pay him back for hornswaggling us that-a-way. At least that's the politics of it, and until we get the politics right then nothing's going to get done.

Not by the 110th Congress that is.