William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, April 3, 2007
So all we could do was to
Sit, sit, sit, sit.
And we did not like it,
Not one little bit.
And then,
Something went bump …
- Dr. Seuss
When the new Democratic majority successfully attached a troop withdrawal deadline to the $124 billion supplemental Iraq spending bill in late March, the newspapers described it as a stunning development. If this bill made it through the Senate, Bush would be faced with a choice he wanted no part of: swallow an exit deadline, or veto a pile of money needed to keep the Iraq meat grinder spinning.
At the time, many antiwar activists were far from enthused by this development. An MSNBC report from March 23 explained why: “The supplemental spending bill would continue to pay for the US mission in Iraq and would authorize that mission at least for 12 more months and possibly longer. The bill tries to limit the length of deployment of Army soldiers to 365 days in Iraq and of Marines to 210 days. But it permits President Bush to waive those restrictions. It also permits US forces to be kept in Iraq beyond the bill’s August 2008 exit target date if they are training Iraqi soldiers or if they are engaging in missions to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.”
So, yes, there was this withdrawal deadline, and that was good. The bill, however, carried the provision allowing Bush to “waive those restrictions,” which amounted to a pre-emptive signing statement that essentially rendered the whole thing moot. Along with this were the bits that would keep US troops in Iraq past the deadline if they were “training Iraqi soldiers” or “engaging in missions to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda.” This has been the description of the “mission” for years now, and will be so in the Fall of 2008, which once again pulled the teeth from any real hope of an actual withdrawal coming from this bill.
It was a political victory for the Democrats, to be sure; at a minimum, watching a vote-passing Democratic majority in the House walk in the same direction long enough to pass anything with “Iraq” and “withdrawal” in the text was something new and interesting. Beyond that, the reaction from a flustered White House was worth the price of admission. Yet the bill itself had no hope, or so it seemed to many at the time, of actually putting a halt to the carnage. Beyond that was the commonly-held assumption that this legislation would die a swift death upon its arrival in the Senate.
And then, something went bump. Senate Democrats passed their own version of this bill, and will work after the recess to reconcile the details with the House before sending it on to the White House. The theoretical became actual, and the tooth-grinding decision facing Bush – eat the deadline or nix the cash – is now an unavoidable reality.