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Glass Half Full: House Democratic Caucus Backs McGovern Afghanistan Exit Amendment
For those concerned the U.S. is becoming mired in a military quagmire
in Afghanistan there was good news and bad news on the House floor Thursday
afternoon:
The good news is that a majority of House Democrats just voted
(131-114) to support the McGovern amendment to the House Defense
Authorization bill that requires the Pentagon to develop a military
exit strategy from Afghanistan.
The bad news is that the overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted against the amendment (164-7), leading to its defeat.
For opponents of endless war in Afghanistan, it is a question of the glass being half empty or half full.
One the one hand, the glass is half full: this was a strong first vote
on what will likely become a prolonged struggle. The early
Congressional votes on the Vietnam and Iraq wars were lopsided affairs
as Members took the bait that a vote against administration policy is a
vote against our troops. With this vote, it's clear that a majority of
Congressional Democrats understand that establishing a clear mission
that includes a strategy for getting our troops home is necessary to
support and protect the men and women we're sending into harm's way.
Endless war is not.
On the other hand, the glass is half empty: Congressman McGovern's
proposal was very modest. It did not proscribe what the exit strategy
should be or on what time-line it should be accomplished. It simply
required the administration to come up with one. As Congressman
McGovern argued on the floor today: "This should not be controversial."
How does something that does what the president himself told a national
television audience last month was needed in Afghanistan go down to
defeat in the House? How does one oppose such a reasonable and modest
proposal?
Simple. You find yourself under pressure from your party leadership-be
it Democratic or Republican-and the administration. Leaders on both
sides of the aisle pulled out all the stops to defeat this measure. The
Democratic and Republican leaders of both the Armed Services and
Foreign Affairs Committees lobbied hard. They circulated a letter from
all four leaders of the committees imploring a no vote while the debate
was underway on the House floor. The administration enlisted the direct
engagement of Secretary of State Clinton and Ambassador Holbrooke to
convince Members to say no. The president may believe in the necessity
of an exit strategy for US forces in Afghanistan but his administration
is loathe to actually come up with one.
The McGovern amendment may have come up short Thursday, but nevertheless
count me in the glass-half-full camp. Winning the House Democratic
Caucus on an issue opposed by Democratic leadership and the White House
is no small feat. Indeed, it is hard to vote against the position of a
president who you so desperately want to succeed. But this is precisely
why many did just that. They do not want to see this administration-and
all of the hope and promise that it brings-mired in an endless war that
ends in a disaster for all. The very real prospect that the escalation
of our forces in Afghanistan will make things much worse and not better
is why 80% of Afghans oppose it.
Our congratulations and thanks go to Congressman McGovern (D-MA),
Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC), Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca), and
Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME), the lead sponsors of this
amendment. They deserve our thanks not only for taking a principled
stand on an important and controversial issue, but for going to work to
make this a significant vote - one that will stand as a marker for the
struggle ahead. Come to think of it, with friends like these in
Congress, our glasses are more than half full.
Now, back to work.
- Posted in
23 Comments so far
Show AllSigh...just one more blow after the $92 billion no-strings-attached funding approved last week. I called my Democratic rep's office yesterday and asked him to cosponsor but he didn't and then he voted against it. I'm sorry to say I did believe last fall that we were actually going to get some change. (Be nice...I'm feeling pretty low about it right now.)
If you want to see how your rep voted, here's the link:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll453.xml
America is safe with their friends. Do we have any? Hired 'friends' don't count.
We seem to be an era of 'hail-mary passes' executed by supporters of a paradigm self assigned to sustain, not life on the planet, but an abstract construct that requires blinkers. People are statistics, climate change generators are titanics cheering because there are fewer icebergs, the planet's waterways seen as service aquaducts, etc.
The staging of the 'final days' scenario has two sides to its theater of performance, one an equally blinkered reading by the 'pain body' mindset seeking to revindicate itself by constructing the conditions, and the other, the assumed audience, not quite en masse yet, getting up out of their seats and walking out before the final curtain.
The power bubble so dependant on human foibles will need to be met with unflagging attention and activism for a long time to come. Legislation on withdraw from militarism is a withdraw also from the drug of war. This particular piece was a thermometer reading, the patient is has a long way to go to recovery. Part of the treatment is learning to love 'enemies' - particularly those opposed to recovery - our own representative bodies.
We have to "make them do it". Never give up.
"The good news is that a majority of House Democrats just voted (131-114) to support the McGovern amendment to the House Defense Authorization bill that requires the Pentagon to develop a military exit strategy from Afghanistan.
The bad news is that the overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted against the amendment (164-7), leading to its defeat."
This here is blatant partisanship. They're both bad news. All this despite a Democrat majority in the House !
Hindu Kush: Where the soldiers of foreign empires come to die.
This special legacy of futility remains perpetually intact because it can only be broken by an understanding of history and geography. (Fat chance!)
Journal Note, October, 2004:
"In a White House dimly illuminated by diminished wit, confusion and boredom are constant hazards, alleviated only by the sport of war and the prospect of spoils. Meanwhile, Democrats accept their stipends for preserving the illusion of a two-party system."
Journal Note, June 26, 2009:
"DITTO"
"Becoming mired in a military quagmire"?!? For your information, Mr. Andrews, the country has been mired in TWO of them for years on end! (The other is Iraq, where US troops are merely pretending to withdraw.) The only difference is, they're no longer Bush's wars, but Obama's.
Vote Pelosi and Reid out.
And vote some better ones in. Any suggestions?
How about voting for a candidate who does not engage in perpetual war like Obama does?
Either lack of imagination, lack of knowledge of current events, or a paid poster.
Alternatives abound. You could just about throw a stick into a crowd and come up with better choices.
And replace them with who? Who would actually be able to affect any change? Who wouldn't be co-opted by money and power on that island of DC? Better yet let's have a nice little reichstag fire so they can finish the job of turning us into a fascist plutocracy.
It's time America's streets looked like Gaza or Iraq. Maybe then the drones will wake up.
Are you ready to fight?
Vote third party. Take to streets. Then vote third party again.
Oliver Hardy to the "no" voters, "Here's another fine mess you got us into".
What is it about obsessing over an "exit strategy" since the powers interpret the benchmarks? Any exit strategy can always be pushed into the future that never arrives. It is like a shell game providing political refuge for those who vote for funding the interminable military operations, while never placing the onus on individual members to produce a 'no' vote against it. An exit strategy is nothing more than a deferment of personal responsibility.
We've discovered that the hand ringing obsessives have a false legacy, they are not the noble iconoclasts they have been painted to be. Such individuals can seem to be so earnest that it is exasperating.
Caught up in their grandiose nightmare of nobility, and on a mission to rescue us from ourselves, they blind themselves to the power they have to change the world in humble, quite ways. They ignore others' small acts of bravery; more than that, they insist that anyone who focuses on such acts is deluding themselves and wasting their time. Given their power careers and associations, they know what is best for the rest of us.
They become petulant when the world does not conform to their high profile careers or demands, and then try to calculate exactly how to build their power base, obsessing over their strategies.
Conversely, the men and women who actually do have the power to influence nations are usually focused on ideas that play out in small and often unexpected ways. Much like the sharing of memes on this web site. They are uninterested in changing the world single-handedly, and they are unassuming and quick to laugh at themselves, because the appearance of power and prestige doesn't matter to them very much.
This talk of "exit strategy" is nothing more than a deferment to ending a war. Vietnam is a powerful reminder to the path Obama is taking us down. Would anyone today feel the loss of human life, and treasure, worth the price today?
Fifty years from now, Afghanistan will take its place alongside of the misadventures of Vietnam. The dead will be dead, the pain left to carry for those families who lost sons, and husbands, and daughters will be memorialized on some wall to silence the voices of the past. And to defer the galactic stupidity of those who invest energy into war instead of peace.
Obama and Bush are such men.
The concern we hold about Afghanistan are articles such as this one that cannot see through the lies: and an exit strategy is a lie being held out as the truth.
Sioux Rose
ELOHIM: Powerful post. I would also add that there is a sweeping momentum cast by history itself, and it has brought us this debacle specifically to represent the END of the premise of empire. Its costliness is now on rabid display for all the world to see, and feel.
True democracy requires respect for diverse voices, but when a society is built around hierarchical features, that very notion, an egalitarian one, is rendered void. Many in this forum primarily focus on the economic aspects of this hierarchy, while others see the social implications. From the moment religions established INequality between the genders, the balance of our world was broken. From there, it became a relatively easy matter to consign one group or another to "untouchable" status, or that of a slave or scapegoat.
The 12 disciples Jesus spoke of also represent 12 co-equal Divine principles which are embodied into human personality types. All are essential to the harmonic workings of our world, a spiritually organic Gestalt. As I have shared in this forum the general patriarchal premise of 'god' suits the archetype of Mars in a hybrid with old Saturn, FATHER time. The disproportionate reverence and emphasis on these two aspects of heaven's circle has turned our world into a battlefield, and made respect for life in all its variations rare. The real folly that we see today results from over 2000 years of false conditioning. The prophecies that speak of a major shift/transition NOW require a mass shift in consciousness. With so many starving, impoverished, exposed to war in all its disgusting applications, a critical mass may well be met to create the collective catharsis required to have humanity fly over the cuckoo's nest that Mars/Mammon built.
Yes, after you accept the half glass, the Democrats trim down the glass itself to the water level, and tell you the glass is full.
Then the next go-around, they offer half of the new glass.
There is no exit strategy for the US military in AfPak and there cannot be one, thanks to our Congress full of failures.
Exits come after either victory or defeat.
There is no victory because the military's goal, as set into law by our corrupt and despicable Congress, is 'preventing future terrorism by our enemies', who just happen to be al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as announced by Bush.
There will never be an end to fighting future terrorists. (We've already killed thousands who weren't even alive when 9/11 happened).
Troops cannot just be withdrawn, because withdrawing troops from AfPak will leave Obama open to political attacks of the worst kind ("the man who let the terrorists loose"). Imagine if all the troops leave and something blows up somewhere.
You're talking political suicide, just like LBJ feared re Vietnam and the Republicans. Is this half-strength support going to have Obama's back?
He probably doesn't think so.
There is, of course, defeat after the inevitable catastrophe that will occur because of US military involvement and behavior in AfPak.
There is one more strategy. Change the rules. Congress must end this Stupid War by taking away the President's authority to have the military fight future terrorists.
Congress must clean up its mess and not expect the President to do it. Public Law 107-40 (AUMF) must be revoked.
from article: "The McGovern amendment may have come up short Thursday, but nevertheless count me in the glass-half-full camp. Winning the House Democratic Caucus on an issue opposed by Democratic leadership and the White House is no small feat"
Please, spare me the phony optimism. The problems we face are much more deep-seated and systemic. This article is just a bit of fluff from a mainstream liberal to other frustrated mainstream liberals. Mr. Andrews needs to take his blinders off so he can see the bigger picture and think more abstractly, outside the parameters of the duopoly status quo
He, along with the vast majority of the U.S. electorate it would seem. One can't help wondering how much of the blindness is self-induced and deliberate. Probably a lot of it in my own estimation when one considers that the realities are so obvious as to be almost self-evident.
To avoid misunderstanding, I should probably add my usual disclamer that my comment has nothing to do with capitalism IN THE MARKETPLACE where it may have some arguable merit (or not). I just don't think that corporate financial dominance of a nation's entire political system is consistent with true "of, by and for the people" democracy in any form. Nor with the alleged benefits of so-called "free enterprise" itself, for that matter.
Sioux Rose
RV: Well-stated. It seems that a lot of these democrats are not as blind as we may (in this forum) have thought. Sure, they're opportunists, but recognizing how far Obama has veered right some of them are now acting out of self-interest to create distance from Obama's policies. After all, I would presume most want to be re-elected. I'm praying for a mutiny from within: whether it's within the military or the congress or among the nation's citizens. Something's gotta give, or it's all gonna collapse.
Our congratulations and thanks go to Congressman McGovern (D-MA), Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC), Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca), and Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME), the lead sponsors of this amendment.
Yes! Bravo!
As for the rest, just the same stench of the bloated Republicrat corpse rotting joyfully in the heat.
Thank mediocrity for very small favors.
An exit strategy doth not an exit make.
Congress will not cut off war funding to this president. The Elephants won't do it because they're for any war. The Donkeys won't do it because they're for their war and their president and their blood-drenched funders.
This has to get settled outside.